Aude Lejeune

Legal Mobilization Within the Bureaucracy: Disability Rights and the Implementation of Antidiscrimination Law in Sweden

This article argues that the analysis of legal mobilization needs to give more attention to the state and its relationship with social movements in order to examine how the state either sustains social movements’ demands or is a field of contention for those demands. Focusing on how disability bureaucrats and activists mobilize antidiscrimination law in Sweden, this article shows that two main factors shape legal mobilization within the bureaucracy and alter the states ability to become a legal mobilization actor: (1) the institutional relationships between social movement organizations and government agencies and (2) the profiles and careers of bureaucrats and activists. It concludes by suggesting several lines for further research on law and social movements in nonpluralist countries.

The construction of workers’ rights consciousness through legal intermediations: the case of employment discrimination in Belgium

Through their different encounters with union, court and government equality agency lawyers, workers report diverse understandings of their personal experience of injustice in the workplace. This article examines workers’ experiences of discrimination and the role legal professionals play in litigating these issues in Belgium. Bringing together legal and rights consciousness studies and the sociology of intermediation and tracking different stages in the construction of discrimination cases, from the moment when a future litigant describes an event as an injustice to the moment when the judge recognizes a discriminatory behaviour (or conversely, dismisses a case), we suggest several possible empirical explanations of the way in which interactions with legal intermediaries affect workers’ rights consciousness. Because we refer to sociolegal studies from common law countries, this article also calls into question how best to import these studies to assist in analysing legal mobilisations and legal consciousness in continental Europe.