Labour Movements and the Effectiveness of Legal Strategy: Three Tenets

Social movements of every stripe have mobilized law in order to confront contemporary injustices and redetermine social experiences and expectations. The multiple disciplinary literatures that track and evaluate these strategies provide a rich picture of legal and political mobilization at different scales and relative successes. This article draws together the shared concern for strategic litigation of labour law and legal mobilization scholars in order to confront and rationalize the factors that determine its effectiveness for labour movements. This article sets out three core tenets of strategic litigation to provide a framework for analysing its potential effectiveness: Effective legal arguments; state law's institutional capacity; and political objectives. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights, these tenets present a sober conception of the ways that law is mobilized by labour movements, to provide a critical conception of the opportunities and limitations of their strategic uses of law.