Scott L. Cummings

Hemmed In: Legal Mobilization in the Los Angeles Anti-Sweatshop Movement

The field of labor organizing - once a site of progressive disenchantment with law - has now become a crucial locus of laws resurgence. There is mounting evidence that legal innovation is contributing to a new dynamism within the labor movement as immigrant worker centers, community-labor coalitions, and other grassroots alliances creatively use law to mobilize low-wage workers. These efforts suggest that a reorientation is under way within the labor movement, with activists adopting a legal pluralist approach to organizing that takes strategic advantage of the multiple and intersecting ways in which both employee and employer activities are legally regulated to leverage the power of law to advance labor goals. Yet, while there are a growing number of stories of legal mobilization campaigns outside of the formal labor law context, the evidence of their short-term impact and transformative legacy is less developed. Nor is there a detailed empirical picture of the variables that impact success and failure. This Article responds to this gap by recounting a pivotal story of contemporary labor activism: the anti-sweatshop movement in the Los Angeles garment industry. It offers a detailed case study of the decade-long campaign to bring accountability to the countrys largest garment production sector. At its most ambitious, the campaign sought to make legal responsibility follow economic power, rupturing the legal fiction that protected profitable retailers and manufacturers from the labor abuses committed by their contractors. Toward this end, the campaign deployed a multi-faceted tactical approach, pioneering the strategic integration of targeted litigation and worker organizing in a way that challenged the conventional wisdom about the demobilizing impact of law - and marked the emergence of a new wave of low-wage worker organizing outside of the traditional labor law regime. This Article examines how law lived up to its promise in the anti-sweatshop movement. It begins by outlining the role of law in facilitating the rise of modern sweatshop labor in the garment industry, showing how industry actors combined legal opportunities for foreign outsourcing and domestic subcontracting with anti-union efforts and aggressive immigrant hiring to deregulate garment production in Los Angeles. It then offers a close descriptive account of the coordinated litigation, legislative, and grassroots campaign to reform industry labor practices by assigning liability to the retailers and manufacturers that ultimately benefited from sweatshop abuse. The Article concludes by appraising the results of the anti-sweatshop campaign from a qualitative empirical perspective, examining what was achieved and what remained undone, while suggesting theoretical implications for the study of labor law and the relationship between law and organizing.

Law and Social Movements: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

This chapter explores the growing interdisciplinary exchange between law and social science that has led to the emergence of “law and social movements” as a distinctive scholarly field. Its main goal is to examine why this exchange has occurred, what vision of law and social movements it has produced, and what it means for the underlying disciplines. Toward this end, the chapter analyzes how American scholars have seized onto social movements as key actors in legal theory and what this says about ongoing debates within legal scholarship over the role of law as a tool of progressive social change. The chapter then traces the parallel development of legal mobilization within social movement theory, emphasizing the particular construction of law as a resource valued for its indirect effects on movement activism. Doing so reveals how the creation of law and social movements is not simply an interdisciplinary synthesis, but responds to different problems in law and sociology. In law, movements have been used by scholars to present a model of progressive legal reform that promises to reclaim the transformative potential of law while preserving traditional roles for courts and lawyers. In sociology, law has provided a link between movements and institutional politics that helps to explain the professional character and durability of movement organizations without undercutting their claim to outsider status. Both visions, the chapter argues, ultimately respond to barriers to progressive social transformation in democratic societies erected by conservative countermobilization and depend on conceptions of law as a flexible resource deployed to build power and shift culture. The chapter ends by exploring the challenges and opportunities of this interdisciplinary project—pointing out intellectual gaps, while suggesting how greater exchange between legal scholarship and social science might produce deeper understanding of core theoretical concepts and enrich empirical inquiry.

Public Interest Law: The United States and Beyond

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by C. Halpern, volume 18, pp. 12549–12553,

Poverty Law: United States

“Poverty law” refers to policy and lawyering strategies to contest inequality. The rise of the federal welfare state shaped the contours of poverty law in the first half of the twentieth century. This combined with the rights revolution at mid-century to mobilize legal services lawyers and courts in the War on Poverty, which was the zenith of the antipoverty movement. The welfare state’s subsequent decline and federal court retrenchment have channeled the antipoverty movement in new directions forged by decentralization, privatization, and globalization. This encyclopedia entry traces poverty laws history and more recent response to these trends by moving downward (from federal to local), outward (from state to market), and beyond (from domestic to global).