Introduction: Legal Mobilization in Nordic Civil Society

Introduction

Across the Nordic region, civil society actors are increasingly using legal mobilization strategies to seek justice and societal change. Notable recent cases include environmental activists filing lawsuits on climate change and Sami groups winning landmark court cases on Indigenous human rights. LGBTQ groups have supported litigation to change policies discriminating against same-sex families and transgender persons, while disability rights activists have gone to court to claim rights to equal access to public facilities, equal treatment, and assistance. Christian groups have sponsored litigation demanding conscientious exemption for healthcare professionals, while Muslims have challenged headscarf bans and mandatory handshake practices. Yet other groups have litigated on issues as diverse as solitary confinement, electronic surveillance, migration policies, collective bargaining arrangements, expropriation and zoning laws, and the supremacy of European Union law. In sum, legal mobilization on fundamental rights claims has become an established repertoire of contention among Nordic social movements.

Nordic states may seem unlikely places for civil society groups to turn to courts to claim rights, challenge public policies, and place issues on public agendas. An established view long held that Nordic states were inhospitable to the use of courts as political arenas, due to strong-state corporatism, political constitutions based on parliamentary sovereignty and deferential courts, a legal-political culture discouraging adversarial legalism, or a welfare-state regime granting extensive entitlements yet few justiciable rights.¹ In terms of scholarship, socio-legal approaches developed for other contexts—such as exploring how civil society support structures bring about judicial rights revolutions or how movement lawyers promote progressive causes—seemed to provide poor analytical leverage for the Nordic settings.² Any evidence to the contrary could be dismissed as external influences undermining Nordic models of democracy, welfare, and law.

Yet the numerous recent examples of civil society groups employing legal strategies suggest a shift has been taking place. Accordingly, recent studies have explored, for instance, legal mobilization by specific groups or in certain issue-areas,³ traced the historical roots of collective action by legal professionals,⁴ and analysed civil society’s role in providing legal aid and access to justice.⁵ Taken together, such research efforts prompt questions about why civil society groups are turning to legal action to claim human rights, how their mobilization unfolds in the judicial arena, and how increasing legal mobilization reshapes Nordic societies.

To advance this emerging research agenda, this special issue brings together a multi-disciplinary group of socio-legal scholars from across Scandinavia to provide new knowledge about legal mobilization in the Nordic context. Joined by this collective aim, the articles take varied theoretical and methodological approaches in unpacking aspects of the phenomenon. Some analyse legal mobilization around discrete causes, while others make comparisons across the Nordic region and beyond, as well as over time. This issue’s contributions are theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant: the papers provide new empirical accounts of previously understudied episodes of contention and neglected aspects of socio-legal relations in Nordic civil society while theorizing how and why groups turn to courts to claim rights, how their claims-making unfolds, and what determines the outcomes. Given public interest both in specific litigation campaigns and the overall trend towards using courts as arenas for social struggles, the special issue also generates knowledge relevant to stakeholders, policymakers, and the public.

2. Legal mobilization: a socio-legal debate

Can social movements change society for the better by mobilizing the law? This question has animated socio-legal studies of legal mobilization for several decades, through successive generations of scholarship spanning the disciplines of law, sociology, and political science. Optimists believe collective legal mobilization can provide redress for grievances, expand possibilities for democratic participation, determine issues around which to organize a movement, place issues on public agendas, bolster a movement’s threat capacity to gain leverage in other arenas, and more.⁶ Sceptics believe legal mobilization risks foregrounding legal expertise within movements at the expense of grassroots participation, benefits privileged actors who can afford to go to court, entraps progressive movement demands for radical social change in an inherently conservative legalistic framework, fuels division and polarization, and risks triggering counter-mobilization by powerful interests.⁷ Potentially, legal mobilization can be all these things, even at the same time: as McCann puts it, the ‘choices of actors who generate litigation as well as their effects or impacts are typically complex, indeterminate and contingent’.⁸

Adding to the dissonance, scholars do not wholly agree on what the concept of legal mobilization entails: some define it as any process by which individual or collective actors assert rights or invoke legal norms to influence societal struggles, whereas others narrowly focus on activists using court litigation and other formal, institutionalized legal mechanisms to effect policy change.⁹ As Molavi (in this issue) notes, the various conceptualizations of legal mobilization differ when it comes to the types of law deployed, the arenas in which contestation occurs, the aims of the mobilizing actors, and the target of their action.¹⁰ For this special issue, rather than stipulating a definition, we acknowledge that conceptual pluralism is part of what has attracted socio-legal scholars to debate legal mobilization for several decades.

In the optimist view prominent within socio-legal scholarship, social movements can mobilize the law to effect veritable social change. Accordingly, the law is a strategic resource and legal mobilization can help social movements obtain rights, remedies, and recognition for marginalized groups; for groups unlikely to win out in majoritarian arenas, legal mobilization thus provides an alternative channel for democratic participation.¹¹ Similarly, in human rights scholarship, legal mobilization for human rights has long been seen as providing a ‘weapon of the weak’: human rights have a power-mediator function, providing relatively weak social agents with normative resources for challenging political authority, which groups can appropriate in collective action to transform the status quo.¹² Rights activism therefore has both instrumental and expressive dimensions, combining demands for political or social change that confront extant power relations with articulations of alternative norms, values, or identities to disrupt prevailing legitimating discourses.¹³ From a systemic perspective, moreover, litigation in courts contributes to providing access to justice and consolidating the rule of law¹⁴—in bringing rights claims to courts, litigants prompt judges to develop jurisprudence that gives the ‘law on the books’ meaning and intended effect.¹⁵

A prominent argument for an optimistic view of legal mobilization emphasizes the radiating effects of litigation—that is, the intended and unintended messages that courts communicate over and above their authoritative doctrinal pronouncements.¹⁶ This centrifugal influence can be used by social movements as a strategic resource in their overall struggles within a broader system of disputation and regulation. Likewise, even when a court case is lost, the radiating effects of the litigation can benefit claimants and strengthen social movements.¹⁷ For instance, Schaffer, Langford, and Madsen (this issue) show how various groups—such as the 1970s movement to preserve the Free Community of Christiania in Copenhagen—have used court litigation to stage contestation, through which courtroom losses may have helped them win the broader cause in the ‘court of public opinion’.¹⁸ Similarly, Sandvik (this issue) concludes that although the movement to preserve the so-called Y Block, an iconic government building damaged in the 2011 terrorist bombing in central Oslo, lost its lawsuit against the government, it constituted a broader victory for the recognition of cultural heritage as a human rights issue.¹⁹

Others, however, view the law with suspicion. Emanating from Marxist-based scepticism of the law and judicial power (see Molavi as well as Schoultz and Muhire in this issue), the classical ‘power conception’ of law recognizes the law as amplifying conflicts in society along class lines, rather than regulating conflict.²⁰ A recurring sceptical argument harks back to Galanter’s claim that the architecture of the legal system tends to benefit privileged actors who have the necessary resources to defend their interests in courts.²¹ Many social movement scholars have argued that framing societal grievances as legal claims to be settled by courts can have negative effects on movements internally, as it foregrounds legal strategies and expertise over wider emancipatory goals,²² but it can also make the underlying societal conflict harder to resolve. Courts represent a ‘hollow hope’ for social change as courts have no capacity to enforce their own judgments.²³ For some sceptics, legal mobilization for human rights is not only ineffective and futile; it is per se a tool for oppression, as emancipatory discourses are appropriated by the powerful to subjugate the weak.²⁴ From a systemic perspective, claiming human rights and mobilizing in courts promotes judicialization, empowering unelected juristocrats at the expense of majoritarian democracy,²⁵ and the depoliticization of social conflicts, since the law serves as a structural barrier to fundamental change.²⁶

In fact, many social movements employ legal strategies knowing that they are risky and possibly futile. Even if the law generally institutionalizes the interests of the elites that have made it, its legitimacy rests on norms of universality that groups can exploit to shift the balance. Sometimes they are only able to halt regression temporarily, sometimes they can achieve landmark victories with the potential to alter power relations in society. For example, Schoultz and Muhire (this issue) show how a syndicalist union (SAC) in Sweden engages continuously with the law and with the Labour Court to negotiate the rights of migrant workers, despite their understanding of the law as an instrument of power and class rule. Likewise, Sami groups claiming Indigenous rights in Norway and Sweden have had some notable successes, as Schaffer, Langford, and Madsen discuss, even though the legal frameworks through which they assert their claims are partly the legacy of the state’s oppression of the Sami people.²⁷

Some seek to resolve the ambivalence between optimism and pessimism around the law by definitional fiat.²⁸ In this approach, legal mobilization is, by definition, the use of legal action to promote universalist norms of diversity, inclusion, and emancipation, while the term lawfare is reserved for legal action that reinforces exclusion and preserves the status quo. Legal mobilization thus denotes the legitimate use of law for progressive ends to counter the instrumentalization of law by states and corporations violating human rights.²⁹ In the Nordic debate, Martin Scheinin has claimed that human rights as a legal strategy entails a particular moral content and that it would consequently be a category mistake to use human rights lawyering to claim property rights,³⁰ nodding to centre-right groups in Sweden mobilizing the European Convention on Human Rights in the 1980s (which Schaffer, Langford, and Madsen analyse in this issue). By defining legal mobilization in terms of its presumed progressive intentions or outcomes, which excludes any legal action serving pernicious motives or having detrimental effects, one can apparently resolve the messy normative ambivalence around it.

Yet legal mobilization is not ontologically progressive, as Molavi argues (this issue).³¹ If we avoid hard-wiring presumed good intentions or good consequences into the concept—a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy—we can use it to capture how a wide range of groups make use of legal tools and venues to achieve dissonant or even conflicting aims. Moreover, a neutral or agnostic conceptualization of legal mobilization allows for grasping how the adoption of legal strategies also alters the self-understandings and long-term aims of social movements, as evidenced by the many movements that have come to reframe their causes in terms of human rights, ranging from LGBTQ groups to anti-abortion activists, from environmental activists to taxpayers’ unions.³² Entering the legal field not only transforms a social struggle into a legal struggle but also alters the conflict dynamics, because ‘even powerful actors must translate their interests into the logic of the law’.³³

The long lineage of these socio-legal debates indicate that they are unlikely to ever be reconciled. This is so partly because the use of law is as complex as law itself, and any assessments of law’s progressive or regressive potential are shaped by the normative beliefs that animate socio-legal scholars’ interest in legal mobilization. It also reflects how difficult it is to assess the complex effects of legal mobilization and litigation.³⁴

To move beyond the simplifying, stylized division between optimists and pessimists regarding the use of law by social movements, many scholars argue for a more detached, critical perspective that recognizes that the law—and its use by civil society groups and social movements—sets both opportunities and constraints. For one thing, most socio-legal scholars seem to agree that litigation alone rarely leads to social change. In a classic of the genre, Scheingold argued that both activists and analysts tend to ‘grossly exaggerate the role that lawyers and litigation can play in a strategy for change’.³⁵ Thus, we should examine under what circumstances legal practices work as a resource for or a constraint on progressive action—or both: ‘legal mobilization does not inherently disempower or empower citizens. How law matters depends on the complex, often changing dynamics of the context in which struggles occur’.³⁶ Perhaps testifying to the difficulty of maintaining this openness to context and complexity, McCann’s recent work has become more pessimistic, seeing the potential role of law as overshadowed by the law’s violent enforcement of a racial capitalist order.³⁷

The articles in this special issue largely do take a normatively detached view that recognizes the complexities of legal mobilization as not so easily sorted into a progressive/regressive dichotomy. For example, Schaffer, Langford, and Madsen show how groups at the political fringes, left and right of the political centre, employed litigation strategies in the 1970s and 1980s to challenge—on very different grounds—a social democratic welfare state seen as having become too heavy-handed.

The articles also show how the transformation of claims into disputes—the so-called dispute pyramid, from naming (recognizing an injury) to blaming (attributing the injury to someone) to claiming (demanding a remedy)³⁸—can unfold along different paths. The legal mobilization of homeless young people analysed by Nielsen and Hammerslev follows the traditional form of the dispute pyramid and, like the contribution of Schoultz and Muhire, captures the more pragmatic and instrumental use of law in individual cases. By contrast, Molavi shows that the transformation of claims into disputes is often turned upside down in class action cases: the starting point for a class action is often the lawyer recruiting clients for a particular case. Either way, the articles demonstrate both opportunities and constraints, as well as optimism and pessimism, in the multiple ways Nordic civil society organizations mobilize the law and courts.

The contributions in this special issue

Nordic socio-legal scholars have historically debated law’s ability to produce social change. The critical legal studies movement emerged in the 1970s, and several articles in the its flagship journal Retfærd and a subsequent edited volume on law as an instrument of social change reflect the division among the movement’s optimists and pessimists, debating whether the use of legal tactics meant that progressive, radical movements accepted the hegemony of the law of the bourgeois state.³⁹ Known in socio-legal circles as the ‘legal strategies debate’ (legalstrategidebatten), this discussion focused on the progressive ability of lawyers and jurisprudence rather than on law as an instrument for civil society and social movements. The doyen of sociology of law in Norway Thomas Mathiesen (1933–2021) moved from representing the pessimist camp to eventually proposing a third stance that incorporates law’s opportunities and constraints.⁴⁰

At the turn of the millennium, the changing role of courts as arenas for political struggle was also debated among academics and policymakers in three broad, coinciding public inquiry commissions taking stock of democracy in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. While the Norwegian report warned that juridification, and particularly the incorporation of international human rights norms into national law, would lead to the decay of majoritarian democracy,⁴¹ the Danish and Swedish reports emphasized how judicial review also enhanced the rule of law, protecting minorities and citizens’ interest in privacy and legal certainty.⁴² Here, Lars Trägårdh argued that compared to paternalist welfare-state agencies, bottom-up rights litigation could empower citizens, especially marginalized groups lacking access to parliamentary channels.⁴³ In a dissenting opinion to the Norwegian report, Hege Skjeie argued that the internationalization of the politics of human rights created new opportunities for transnational mobilization and politicization among those advocating gender equality and women’s rights, which could challenge extant elite settlements and power constellations.⁴⁴ Still, many regarded international human rights law, European judicial review, and rights mobilization as a worrying exogenous disruption of well-ordered, egalitarian Nordic democracies.⁴⁵

Yet the landscape of legal mobilization and judicial politics in the Nordic countries has continued to evolve since the debates of the 1980s and 2000s. The articles comprising this special issue originate in the workshop Legal mobilization in Nordic civil society, held at the University of Gothenburg on 7–8 June 2022. The issue opens with an article by Johan Karlsson Schaffer, Malcolm Langford, and Mikael Rask Madsen containing a historical and comparative analysis of the development of legal mobilization across Scandinavia.⁴⁶ They show how and why civil society groups in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have increasingly turned to legal mobilization and litigation in recent decades. Legal mobilization strategies employed across Scandinavia have grown in both quantity and quality, but with distinct differences between the three countries. They have expanded the most in Sweden, followed by Norway, while legal strategies by civil society actors are more marginal in Denmark. The authors propose that civil society groups have increasingly turned to legal mobilization because the political-legal opportunity structure has developed in a more favourable direction for it, in combination with the development of resources that facilitate it and an emergent ‘rights framing’ of the claims of various organizations. The article also asks how effective legal mobilization is compared to other strategies when advancing the rights of various interest groups.

Next, Michael Molavi’s contribution focuses on a particular form of legal mobilization, namely class actions. He situates class actions in the legal mobilization tradition while comparing the class action regimes of Canada and Sweden. Class action can be viewed as a tool for empowering less powerful groups and communities to take legal actions against powerful actors such as states and corporations. The article brings up Canada’s as an example of a mature second-generation class action regime and discusses the role of class actions in facilitating collective legal mobilization in the case of claims-making by Indigenous victims of Residential School abuses. Molavi argues that although it is difficult to undervalue the role of the collective legal mobilization for the Indigenous victims, the class actions have been spurred by the economic interests of lawyers trying to maximize their profit at the claimants’ expense. Sweden, on the other hand, belongs to the mature third-generation regime and class actions remain quite rare despite it having the oldest regime in the Nordics. Molavi discusses the features of the Swedish system, the opt-in model, and its generous approach to standing in relation to Sweden’s inhospitable costs and fee climate and its non-litigating legal culture. The article ends with a reflection on the potential and serious limitations of class actions.

In her article, Kristin Bergtora Sandvik investigates the battle for the so-called Y Block, which was damaged in the bombing of the government quarters in Oslo on 22 July 2011, as an instance of legal mobilization to protect cultural heritage. Sandvik draws on vast documentation of the case, including regulation and administrative processes, legal documents, court cases, documentation of events aiming at saving the Y Block, and media coverage. She discusses the dispute over the Y Block as a question of human rights to and in public space, and legal mobilization as part of a growing recognition of cultural heritage as a human rights issue. Sandvik argues that even though the legal strategies employed by a large group of stakeholders failed to preserve the Y Block as cultural heritage, they contributed to its symbolic value. Her article highlights that the outcome of legal mobilization strategies can be elusive and that a lost battle can lead to a broader victory.

In their contribution, Isabel Schoultz and Heraclitos Muhire focus on the strategies utilized by trade unions to mobilize migrant workers’ rights. The union representatives have been faced with a new group of workers, who are rarely union members and quite often undocumented. Schoultz and Muhire draw on qualitative interviews with trade union representatives, visits to trade union centers as well as court judgements from the Labour Court and other civil courts. They show how the practical, aspirational, and creative engagement of a small group of trade union representatives with the law and courts has generated a new form for mobilizing the rights of migrant workers. Union representatives help to develop migrant workers’ awareness of their (labour) rights, provide a platform for collective rights-claiming actions, and provide legal assistance to migrant workers. Schoultz and Muhire also show how rights claiming in relation to migrant workers is largely achieved through negotiations with employers under the threat of going to court. Part of this work constitutes a traditional area of labour union activity, but union representatives have also developed skills in playing the law game in pragmatic and creative ways. The authors furthermore examine how a syndicalist union uses law as a pragmatic tool for collective aims at the same time as it views law as an instrument of power and class rule.

In the final article of the special issue, Stine Piilgaard Porner Nielsen and Ole Hammerslev examine legal opportunity structures for accessing rights and processes of mobilizing law among young people in Denmark experiencing homelessness. Drawing on Danish social law sources and on interviews with young people in homelessness, Nielsen and Hammerslev assess how both structural factors, such the welfare system, and individual factors, such as networks and resources, influence if and how a young person in homelessness turns to law and ultimately shape their access to social support. Nielsen and Hammerslev argue that the way in which Danish welfare law is structured creates municipal variations which impact the legal mobilization process of the young people experiencing homelessness. Furthermore, Nielsen and Hammerslev uncover different legal mobilization processes based on individual factors that shape the strategies the young homeless employ when mobilizing their social rights. In particular, individuals’ rights consciousness and social network are decisive for their access to rights. The article offers valuable insights to the role of negotiating audiences, who can translate the social situation of the young homeless into social rights, as necessary elements for marginalized individuals to transform their rights into practice.

Conclusion

This special issue serves to chart how legal mobilization and litigation strategies have become more prominent repertoires of contention in Nordic civil society. The empirical case studies in these articles evince how quite diverse groups and organizations are including legal tactics in their overall efforts to pursue their aims. Some groups have engaged in classic strategic public interest litigation, carefully identifying suitable litigants to achieve broader policy change, beyond redress for individuals. Others engage with the law more pragmatically, using legal tactics on an ad hoc basis simply because it has a potential to work. Successful legal strategies and tactics also seem to take on a life of their own, as groups learn from and imitate the previous successes of other groups. Some groups have even turned legal aid and rights litigation into their key raison d’être and business model. Furthermore, some organizations that used to be skeptical about courts as protectors of rights have reassessed their strategies.

Of course, the extent of this development should not be exaggerated: beyond the high-profile landmark court cases and mediatized legal disputes, the phenomenon is still a marginal phenomenon in the landscape of Nordic civil society. Yet it has had an impact on law and politics in the Nordic states: for better and for worse, legal mobilization and court litigation by civil society groups is both a cause and an effect of changing legal and political opportunities, and it will likely continue to reshape relations between policymaking, judiciaries, and civil society in the future.

Notes

1 Johan Karlsson Schaffer, Malcolm Langford and Mikael Rask Madsen, ‘An Unlikely Rights Revolution: Courts, Rights and Legal Mobilization in Scandinavia since the 1970s’ (2024) 42 Nordic Journal of Human Rights (this issue).

2 Charles R Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Univ of Chicago Press 1998); Austin Sarat and Stuart A Scheingold, Cause Lawyers and Social Movements (Stanford University Press 2006).

3 Aude Lejeune, ‘Legal Mobilization within the Bureaucracy: Disability Rights and the Implementation of Antidiscrimination Law in Sweden’ (2017) 39 Law & Policy 237; Kjersti Lohne and Marte Rua, ‘Rettspolitisk mobilisering og strategisk sakførsel mot isolasjon i norske fengsler’ (2021) 108 Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab 118; Jeffrey Miller, ‘Explaining Paradigm Shifts in Danish Anti-Discrimination Law’ (2019) 26 Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 540.

4 Malcolm M Feeley and Malcolm Langford (eds), The Limits of the Legal Complex: Nordic Lawyers and Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press 2021).

5 Olaf Halvorsen Rønning and Ole Hammerslev (eds), Outsourcing Legal Aid in the Nordic Welfare States (Springer International Publishing 2018) <http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-46684-2> accessed 28 January 2021; Johan Karlsson Schaffer, ‘Rättvisans entreprenörer: Mobilisering för tillgång till rättvisa i civilsamhället’ in Anna Wallerman Ghavanini and Sebastian Wejedal (eds), Access to justice i Skandinavien (Santérus Academic Press 2022).

6 Catherine Albiston, ‘The Dark Side of Litigation as a Social Movement Strategy’ (2010) 96 Iowa Law Review Bulletin 61; Lisa Vanhala and Jacqui Kinghan, ‘Literature Review on the Use and Impact of Litigation’ (Public Law Project 2018) PLP Research Paper <https://dev.publiclawproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Literature-Review.pdf>.

7 Albiston (n 6); Vanhala and Kinghan (n 6).

8 Michael McCann, ‘Law and Social Movements: Contemporary Perspectives’ (2006) 2 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 17.

9 Frances Kahn Zemans, ‘Legal Mobilization: The Neglected Role of the Law in the Political System’ (1983) 77 American Political Science Review 690; Lisa Vanhala, ‘Legal Mobilization’, Oxford Bibliographies (2021) <10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0031> accessed 4 April 2022; Holly J McCammon and Allison R McGrath, ‘Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System’ (2015) 9 Sociology Compass 128; Emilio Lehoucq and Whitney K Taylor, ‘Conceptualizing Legal Mobilization: How Should We Understand the Deployment of Legal Strategies?’ (2020) 45 Law & Social Inquiry 166.

10 Michael Molavi, ‘Collective Legal Mobilisation: Exploring Class Actions in Sweden and Canada’ (2024) 42 Nordic Journal of Human Rights (this issue).

11 Rachel A Cichowski, ‘Courts, Rights, and Democratic Participation’ (2006) 39 Comparative Political Studies 50.

12 Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Human Rights in a Global Ecumene’ (2011) 87 International Affairs 1205; Johan Karlsson Schaffer, ‘The Point of the Practice of Human Rights: International Concern or Domestic Empowerment?’ in Reidar Maliks and Johan Karlsson Schaffer (eds), Moral and political conceptions of human rights: implications for theory and practice (Cambridge University Press 2017); RJ Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge University Press 1986); Kate Nash, ‘Towards a Political Sociology of Human Rights’ in Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash and Alan Scott (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (Wiley-Blackwell 2012).

13 Neil Stammers, ‘Social Movements and the Social Construction of Human Rights’ (1999) 21 Human Rights Quarterly 980.

14 Gesine Fuchs, ‘Rechtsmobilisierung. Ein Systematisierungsversuch’ (2020) 41 Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 21.

15 Schaffer (n 5) 386.

16 Marc Galanter, ‘The Radiating Effects of Courts’ in Keith Boyum and Lynn Mather (eds), Empirical theories about courts (Longman 1983) 117–142.

17 Michael W McCann, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (University of Chicago Press 1994).

18 Schaffer, Langford and Madsen (n 1).

19 Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, ‘Cultural Heritage and Legal Mobilisation After Terror: July 22 and the Battle for Y’ (2023) 42 Nordic Journal of Human Rights <https://doi.org/10.1080/18918131.2023.2223055> accessed 21 December 2023.

20 Austin T Turk, ‘Law as a Weapon in Social Conflict’ (1976) 23 Social Problems 276.

21 Marc Galanter, ‘Why the “Haves” Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change’ (1974) 9 Law & Society Review 95.

22 Sandra R Levitsky, ‘To Lead with Law: Reassessing the Influence of Legal Advocacy Organizations in Social Movements’ in Austin Sarat and Stuart A Scheingold (eds), Cause Lawyers and Social Movements (Stanford University Press 2006).

23 Gerald N Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? (2nd ed, University of Chicago Press 2008).

24 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015).

25 Ran Hirschl, ‘The Judicialization of Mega-Politics and the Rise of Political Courts’ (2008) 11 Annual Review of Political Science 93.

26 Sonja Buckel, Maximilian Pichl and Carolina A Vestena, ‘Legal Struggles: A Social Theory Perspective on Strategic Litigation and Legal Mobilisation’ [2023] Social & Legal Studies 09646639231153783, 6.

27 Schaffer, Langford and Madsen (n 1).

28 Jeff Handmaker and Sanne Taekema, ‘O Lungo Drom: Legal Mobilization as Counterpower’ (2023) 15 Journal of Human Rights Practice 6; Thandiwe Matthews, ‘Interrogating the Debates Around Lawfare and Legal Mobilization: A Literature Review’ (2023) 15 Journal of Human Rights Practice 24.

29 Matthews (n 28).

30 Martin Scheinin, ‘Mänskliga rättigheter som legalstrategi’ (1992) 15 Retfærd 3.

31 Molavi (n 10).

32 Isabel Schoultz, ‘European Court of Human Rights: Accountability to Whom?’ [2016] Towards a Victimology of State Crime 173; Schaffer, Langford and Madsen (n 1).

33 Buckel, Pichl and Vestena (n 26) 9.

34 Sandra Botero and Daniel M Brinks, ‘The Politics of Judicial Impact in Social and Economic Rights Cases’ in Malcolm Langford and Katharine Young (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights (Oxford University Press 2023) <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197550021.013.15> accessed 14 August 2023.

35 Stuart A Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change (University of Michigan Press 2010) 5.

36 Michael McCann, ‘Law and Social Movements’ in Austin Sarat (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004) <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470693650.ch27/summary> accessed 9 January 2018.

37 Michael W McCann and George I Lovell, Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism (University of Chicago Press 2020).

38 William LF Felstiner, Richard L Abel and Austin Sarat, ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming … ’ (1980) 15 Law & Society Review 631.

39 Mikael Rask Madsen, ‘Denmark: Between the Law-State and Welfare State’ in Malcolm M Feeley and Malcolm Langford (eds), The Limits of the Legal Complex: Nordic Lawyers and Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press 2021) 135; Melka Kjellberg and Olle Lönneaus, ‘Diskussionen om legalstrategier i Retfærd – Ett sammandrag’ in Håkan Hydén (ed), Rätten som instrument för social förändring: Om legalstrategier (Liber 1982).

40 Thomas Mathiesen, Retten i samfunnet: En innføring i rettssosiologi (Pax 2011).

41 Arbeids- og administrasjonsdepartementet, Makt og demokrati: Sluttrapport fra Makt- og demokratiutredningen 2003 [NOU 2003:19].

42 Jørgen Goul Andersen and others, Magt og demokrati i Danmark: Hovedresultater fra Magtudredningen (Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2003); Kulturdepartementet, En uthållig demokrati! Politik för folkstyrelse på 2000-talet 2000 [SOU 2000:1].

43 Lars Trägårdh, Bemäktiga individerna: Om domstolarna, lagen och de individuella rättigheterna i Sverige. (Demokratiutredningen 1999) <http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/1306>.

44 Arbeids- og administrasjonsdepartementet, Makt og demokrati: Sluttrapport fra Makt- og demokratiutredningen (n 41) 74–87.

45 For a review of these debates, see the special issue 27(2) of this journal, and especially Andreas Føllesdal and Marlene Wind, ‘Nordic Reluctance towards Judicial Review under Siege’ (2009) 27 Nordic Journal of Human Rights 131.

46 Schaffer, Langford and Madsen (n 1).