Legal Mobilization Platform

• Tackling the environmental crises while ensuring a just transition to sustainable societies

• Achieving the universal realization of human rights, which includes access to safe and affordable housing, nutrition, water security and healthcare, and reproductive health

• Addressing systemic racism, including the racial legacies of slavery and colonialism

These societal challenges mainly involve legal obligations of states, but also of private actors. Understanding the potential for mobilizing these obligations is the core aim of the Legal Mobilization Platform (LMP).

Establishing accountability for implementing relevant obligations of states and private actors holds the potential to substantially contribute to climate, racial and socioeconomic justice. Further, identifying shortcomings of existing legal frameworks helps to understand where the law may need to be reformed or strengthened in order to promote (rather than undermine) these various forms of justice.

Against this backdrop, the work of the LMP centres on the question: How can we understand and strategically strengthen various forms of legal mobilization, and those who engage in it, in order to address key accountability challenges at the local and global levels, in ways that are impactful, legitimate and supportive of the rule of law, and ultimately contribute to systemic justice?

Mobilizing the law can force key actors to comply with obligations towards climate justice, racial justice and socioeconomic justice, and to identify and correct normative gaps and flaws in legal systems. Aimed at challenging existing power structures, it is often met with fierce resistance.

Legal mobilization therefore requires deliberate, strategic, bold and innovative approaches.

The Platform supports and strengthens impactful, legitimate forms of legal mobilization and those involved in them in the fields of climate, racial and socio-economic justice, thus strengthening legal certainty, the rule of law and, ultimately, systemic justice.

It strengthens legal mobilization in different ways:

• Enhancing impact

International legal agreements made by states in the field of climate, racial and socio-economic justice and related national laws are not always implemented by these states in accordance with the standards set by human rights treaty bodies and other supervisory organs. How can legal mobilization resolve this lack of implementation and promote accountability and how can we better understand the institutional dimensions at local, national and international levels? 

Research within the LMP focuses specifically on assessing impact, synthesizing the critical literature in this field, helping to develop methodological approaches and drawing on action research data and the input from societal partners to develop a theory of how to strengthen the impact of legal mobilization in different fields, directed towards systemic justice.

• Enhancing legitimacy

The political dimension of legal mobilization, whereby organizations explicitly recognize and engage with relations of power and embedded interests, tends not to be addressed in the choice of specific legal mobilization strategies, thus risking (a perception of) illegitimacy.

Researchers within the LMP synthesize literature on assessing normative and social legitimacy, developing various legal and empirical research methods, to subsequently draw upon action research data and other input from societal partners to understand how the legitimacy of various forms of legal mobilization in different fields can be strengthened.

• Strengthening the rule of law

In its ideal form, legal mobilization strengthens the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), in ensuring that the government abides by the rule of law. The rule of law itself serves to protect the rights of minorities, safeguards the independence of institutions within the trias politica, and protects the security of those involved in deliberative democracy. It is precisely because legal mobilization may potentially undermine positions of power and privilege that legal mobilizers may be under threat, thus triggering a need for legal protection.

Researchers within the LMP synthesize literature on the role of legal defenders in strengthening the rule of law as a whole, also drawing upon action research data and other input from societal partners to create insight on potential ways of supporting legal defenders while strengthening the rule of law as a whole.

• Fostering joint learning

There is significant potential for joint learning between practitioners and academics on strategies of legal mobilization in considering their impact, legitimacy and relevance to the rule of law.

To harness this potential, the LMP utilizes a pedagogical learning approach that is critically-reflexive (Jessop and Knio 2019), exploring the multiple factors that contribute to societal and political dilemmas. This approach is designed to provide strategically-important insights into how the law may respond to and, above-all, respond to and manage situations of crisis.

About the header image

Wittgenstein (1892) – Visualizing the interplay of law and politics to transition from conflict to cooperation. 'To persist in asking the question "but is the jurist or the politician right?" is like asking whether the image really is that of a rabbit or a duck. All depends on the background assumptions against which we examine the image, the vocabulary through which we try to grasp its meaning.' (Koskenniemi 2019:27)