On the Social Construction of Legal Grievances: Evidence From Colombia and South Africa

Abstract

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, this article investigates legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. This kind of rights contestation represents a new phenomenon, in which both ordinary citizens and judicial actors have come to view problems related to access to health care, housing, education, and social security through the lens of the law. Research on legal mobilization has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. Drawing on an analysis of rights claims and 178 interviews, this article aims to correct these imbalances. In doing so, it offers a generalizable model that accounts for the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims, and explains both the emergence and continuation of legal mobilization for social rights.

Keywords

African politics judicial process Latin American politics law and courts law and society

Introduction

Increasingly, states have recognized social rights in their constitutions and empowered courts to hear claims to these rights. In fact, at present, 133 countries recognize the right to health, 74 recognize the right to housing, and 94 have Constitutional Courts (Constitute Project, 2018). The constitutional recognition of social rights offers citizens a new channel through which they can seek to access social goods or alter social policy. While typically expansions in social protection have stemmed from electoral competition or other pressures on elected officials (Garay, 2016; Iversen, 2005), shifts in the preferences of employers (Mares, 2003; Swenson, 2002), or the empowerment of the political left (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Huber & Stephens, 2012), social incorporation also expands by virtue of the ability of citizens to advance rights claims through the formal legal system. In other words, legal claims-making related to social welfare goods reflects a new model of state–society relations, wherein social incorporation derives from universalistic rights recognitions rather than programmatic or particularistic linkages to parties, patrons, or employers.

However, citizens have advanced claims to social rights using these new courts in very different ways across countries (Gauri & Brinks, 2008). For example, in Colombia, legal claims to the right to health have become ubiquitous, particularly through the tutela procedure,¹ yet relatively few housing rights claims have emerged. Legal claims to the right to health in South Africa, on the contrary, have been rather limited, whereas claims to the right to housing predominate. Why is this the case? What accounts for variation in legal mobilization across countries and issue areas?

Existing research on legal mobilization² has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. While functionalist accounts suggest that claims-making patterns will simply reflect differences in underlying need, this is not so. Furthermore, neither institutional design nor support structures are necessary or sufficient conditions for explaining claims-making practices, though both feature prominently in existing accounts. Similarly, although theories of judicial behavior offer insight into the decisions that judges hand down, they have been largely divorced from questions related to how and why citizens or social movements bring particular cases before the courts at particular times.

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, I investigate legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. While the constitutions of both countries recognize social rights, they do so in different ways, and while both constitutions sought to cement a new legal system that would be more responsive to citizens’ needs and more accessible to them, these systems took on different forms, which influenced the pattern of legal mobilization that emerged in each country. The tutela procedure in Colombia, with its low cost and relatively simple filing process, encourages individuals to make rights claims themselves, while in South Africa, the higher cost and higher degree of technical knowledge required prompt collective claims-making, often with the support of pro bono lawyers. However, these institutional differences alone do not explain differences in legal mobilization, specifically they cannot account for the prevalence of health claims in Colombia and housing claims in South Africa. Within this national-level comparison, cross-sector comparisons at the subnational level between different social rights reveal the importance of the response of social actors to legal opportunities and patterns of judicial receptivity.

By situating legal claims-making for health rights relative to housing rights claims, and legal mobilization in Colombia relative to South Africa, I uncover both commonalities and points of difference that would be obscured in single-country, single-issue, or large-N studies. I show that patterns in legal mobilization derive from a highly contingent and recursive process, involving the interplay between potential claimants, judges, and a variety of actors not typically associated with the formal legal system. In doing so, I develop what I call “the constructivist account of legal mobilization,”³ a model that recognizes these contingent and context-specific factors while also drawing out generalizable insights. The model offers an explanation for the shift between the initial period of experimental claims-making with unpredictable outcomes that came in the wake of the creation of new constitutions when understandings about rights, the law, and state obligations held by both potential claimants and judges were unsettled and later, established patterns of claims-making and judicial decision-making. This shift involves (a) the social construction of specific issues as “legally grievable” and (b) the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims through a reinterpretation of the meaning and scope of fundamental constitutional rights. Thus, this model helps to clarify “the process of mobilizing the law” (Arrington, 2019, p. 333).

This research contributes to scholarship on legal mobilization and comparative law and courts in several ways. First, building from prior studies, I develop a model of legal mobilization that offers a holistic understanding of legal claims-making, judicial behavior, and the dynamic relationship between the two. Second, my account goes a step beyond existing models to theorize not only the emergence of legal mobilization but also surges in mobilization for certain rights but not others. Third, I identify a new mechanism that helps to explain changes in judicial receptivity to particular kinds of legal claims: public exposure to problems. González-Ocantos (2016) and Hollis-Brusky (2015) have demonstrated that changes in argumentation about legal interpretation and changes in personnel can influence judicial receptivity. I show that, in addition to these mechanisms, public exposure to problems can affect judicial receptivity. Through public exposure to problems, judges come to interpret issues as legal in nature and as appropriately resolved in the formal legal sphere that they previously viewed as falling outside the domain of the law. Finally, my constructivist account shows the importance of recognizing the agency of judges, claimants, and counterclaimants as they contest the meaning of rights. Neither judges nor claimants are passive actors; instead, both play vital roles in producing the feedback loops that reinforce cycles of legal mobilization.

Legal Opportunity, Support Structures, and Claims-Making

The concept of “opportunity” features prominently in contemporary analyses of both social and legal mobilization. Within the political process model, developed to explain social movement and protest activity, scholars refined the notion of the “political opportunity structure,” which refers to “consistent—but not necessarily formal or permanent—dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure” (Tarrow, 1994, p. 163). Importantly, however, opportunity alone is not enough to cause mobilization. As McAdam and Tarrow (2019) note, the original political process model held that “it is the confluence of political opportunities, indigenous organizational capacity, and the emergence of an oppositional consciousness (or ‘cognitive liberation’) that shape the rise of a movement and its prospects for success” (p. 21). Studies refining the concepts of political opportunity, organizational capacity, and, to a lesser extent, the ideational elements of mobilization have proliferated.

Hilson (2002) adapted the concept of political opportunity to focus specifically on the conditions under which social actors are able to mobilize law to make demands. Legal opportunity encompasses both institutional and contingent factors. Vanhala (2018b) notes that “at least three factors matter across jurisdictions and across policy areas: legal stock, standing rules, and rules on costs” (p. 112). Legal stock refers to the existing body of law and delimits the kinds of legal arguments that can be advanced, while standing rules determine who can bring claims before the courts, and rules on cost set out the amount of financial risk litigants undertake when initiating a court case. In addition to these factors that limit both access to the courts and the types of claims that can formally (or reasonably) be made, scholars have also highlighted the importance of judicial receptivity and a “support structure” of social and material resources available to claimants (Andersen, 2005; Epp, 1998; Galanter, 1974). The classic support structure model (Epp, 1998) demonstrates how societal actors facilitate litigation, easing constraints on would-be claimants by providing financial support, technical knowledge, and other such resources.

Like political opportunities, legal opportunities are not static in nature and can be created and altered by would-be mobilizers in a political process that involves contestation over ideas, actors, and institutions. This has to do with the nature of court–society relations. As Ríos-Figueroa (2016) notes,

the dialogue between the court, the public, and the political actors runs both ways, because the court sometimes sets the public debate going, but other times it starts from what the majority, a minority, or a specific political actor raises as a critical issue. (p. 20)

Studies of diverse topics such as environmentalism in England and Scotland (Vanhala, 2012, 2018b), human rights movements across Latin America (González-Ocantos, 2016), and mobilization against political violence (Gallagher, 2017) demonstrate how actors can modify conditions of legal opportunity through educational campaigns and the formation of multidimensional support structures that simultaneously agitate for change and facilitate ties with the state.⁴

Yet, it is not rules and resources as such that meaningfully and directly affect the possibility of legal mobilization but the perceptions of potential claimants (Andersen, 2005). The beliefs that potential claimants have about institutional purpose or orientation, institutional rules, as well as their own resources and external support affect when opportunities are recognized and acted upon. In other words, theories of legal opportunity implicitly rest on assumptions about the beliefs of the actors involved. Opportunities must be understood as such to be acted on. As McAdam (1982) wrote in his seminal study of the “black insurgency” in the United States, “Mediating between opportunity and action are people and the subjective meanings they attach to their situation” (p. 48). Legal opportunity is thus subjective, flexible, and contingent.

Building on these works, I develop my constructivist account of legal mobilization, which explains both the emergence and endurance of legal claims-making regarding social rights. The account also clarifies the importance of societal actors⁵—from pharmaceutical and insurance companies to advocacy networks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community organizations—for legal mobilization. In moving from the period immediately following the adoption of new constitutional frameworks, which set out new opportunities for legal mobilization, to subsequent periods, during which patterns of claims-making and judicial decision-making are more firmly established, societal actors affect the judicialization of grievances and judicial receptivity.

In this model, societal actors play an integral role in legal mobilization, not only materially supporting claimants in their efforts to seek redress but also actively contributing to the social construction of grievances by helping to frame certain issues as legally grievable.⁶ In other words, societal actors encourage potential claimants to view a specific problem through the lens of the law and to make claims in the formal legal system rather than doing nothing or advancing a claim in some other setting. Many investigations of mobilization either assume that grievances are based on “underlying activity” (following Casper & Posner, 1974) or are simply ever-present (following McCarthy & Zald, 1977), or they fail to articulate a stance on where grievances come from and how actors recognize something as a grievance. My constructivist approach, in contrast, acknowledges that grievances, and especially legal grievances, develop through social interaction rather than appear unmediated as a result of material conditions (Simmons, 2016). As activists, lawyers, judges, and government officials participate in the framing of an issue as legal in nature (by advancing such a frame, accepting it, or failing to contest it), this legal frame may spread and come to be incorporated diffusely into everyday understandings of the issue in question (McCann, 1994; Pedriana, 2006; Vanhala, 2016, 2018a, 2018b).

There is also a more direct process by which NGOs, legal aid services, and other actors reach out to individuals who have a particular and argue that the problem is a legal one, one that should be addressed in the formal legal sphere. This kind of action is most clear in strategic litigation campaigns, but it is potentially much broader than that. In fact, as shown in greater detail below, in the case of health rights claims in Colombia, insurance companies that were targeted in legal claims ultimately came to encourage continued claims-making in this direct fashion, as the legal cases counterintuitively offered these companies the possibility of financial gain rather than sanction. Another variant of this process involves NGOs and legal aid services convincing potential claimants to actually pursue litigation, vouching that there is viable argument and reasonable chance of winning. Through these processes, potential claimants come to view issues that previously they were willing (or resigned) to ignore or to deal with in other ways as legal issues, as legally grievable. The material reality of people’s lives does not change, but their understanding of that reality does.

Societal actors affect not only claimants and the process by which grievances are socially constructed but also judicial receptivity to particular claims. Key holdings of my constructivist account of legal mobilization are that judicial receptivity is not static and that it does not fall solely within the domain of judges. Existing studies have identified two mechanisms through which societal actors can influence judicial receptivity to particular claims: changes in argumentation about points of legal interpretation and changes in personnel. With respect to argumentation about legal interpretation, González-Ocantos (2016) and Hollis-Brusky (2015), in studies of transitional justice in Latin America and the Federalist Society in the United States, respectively, show how civil society organizations can play a pedagogical role, introducing and supporting new arguments about rights or interpretation to sympathetic judges. They further demonstrate that societal actors may focus on personnel changes, advocating for the replacement of opposed judges and for the nomination of favored judges.

I identify an additional mechanism: public exposure to problems. This mechanism involves a joint public and legal process, where an issue becomes visible to judges in their lived experience outside the courtroom as well as legible to judges as legal in nature. Judges come to see that this legal problem is not being dealt with well in the context of the legal system. They then become more open to new legal approaches to the issue.

The exposure mechanism differs from the argumentation mechanism in that judges are not swayed by new legal arguments, but the persistence and/or increase of claims related to a specific grievance cumulatively inform judges about an issue, allowing them to become comfortable with the scope of the issue and more aware of the issue’s salience, and to identify with claimants. This can spark a consideration or reconsideration about the correct legal response to that issue—and therefore those claims. Although Feeley and Rubin (1998) examine judicial policy-making rather than legal mobilization, they identify a similar process at play in their analysis of the judicial response to reprehensible prison conditions in the United States, suggesting that “these conditions had existed for a century, of course; what changed suddenly, in 1965, was the judiciary’s perceptions of them” (p. 160). Here, continued claims-making (and thus continued exposure) ultimately prompted a change in judicial receptivity.

Breaking this process down, an initial confluence of exposure in daily life outside the legal system and exposure within the legal system plays an important role in the development of judicial receptivity, inspiring judges to connect an issue that they have perhaps seen on television or in their everyday lives with the format, scope, and tools of law. Repeated exposure to similar cases within the formal legal system has several concrete effects. As Ríos-Figueroa (2016) outlines, where there is a “continuous flow of cases [judges] will not only get more and more varied information, but will also be more able to express their jurisprudential preferences under more favorable circumstances” (p. 29). By contrast, if there are only a handful of cases on a particular topic over a longer period of time, judges will have less flexibility in their decision-making, as they are bound by the facts of the cases before them and may be forced to decide cases in unfavorable political environments. The mere existence of many potential cases does not necessarily mean that judges will seek to resolve those cases in novel ways. In fact, repeated exposure alone could result in a hardening of judges’ views. This is where repeated exposure to the issue in daily life and assessments of the nature of the issue come into play. When judges view the issue as oppositional to contemporary sociolegal values, such as country-specific understandings of what constitutes justice or dignity,⁷ this exposure results in judicial receptivity, as judges come to understand an issue as appropriately resolved in the formal legal sphere.⁸

Where sustained legal claims-making related to a particular issue, following the identification of the issue as legally grievable, prompts judicial receptivity by exposing judges to that issue, a positive feedback loop forms. Receptivity then inspires further claims-making, especially if judges signal to potential claimants the kinds of arguments or claims they are most likely to evaluate favorably by staging pedagogical interventions or offering “cues” (Baird, 2007), spreading information to potential claimants about the kinds of arguments or claims likely to be accepted.

Patterns in Legal Mobilization for Social Rights in Colombia and South Africa

This article features a comparison of legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. I selected the cases of Colombia and South Africa not on the basis of an ability to control away existing explanations for legal mobilization but with the goal of examining how seemingly similar processes emerge and develop in different ways in different contexts—a strategy that follows the logic of contextualized comparisons (Simmons, 2016) and analytically parallel cases (Locke & Thelen, 1995). Within the national-level comparison, I compare legal claims-making related to different social rights in each country, thus leveraging comparisons both within and across cases to help me understand the dynamic process of legal mobilization. For more on this approach, see Appendix A (Supplemental Material).

To identify and assess patterns in legal mobilization, I draw on interviews with 178 respondents and an analysis of constitutional rights claims. Over the course of nearly 2 years of fieldwork in Colombia and South Africa, I conducted semistructured interviews with current and former Constitutional Court justices and clerks, other lawyers and judges, members of civil society, academics, and government officials. I also compiled databases of social rights cases (those that explicitly referred to the right to education, health, housing, social security, and/or water) in both countries. Colombian case information comes from national-level summary statistics about tutelas published by the national ombudsperson’s office and a random sample of tutelas reviewed by the Colombian Constitutional Court (CCC) between 1992 and 2016 that I collected from the Court’s website. Importantly, although the Court has the power to review all tutela decisions, consider the immense number of tutela claims each year, it only reviews about 1% of all decisions. These reviewed decisions help to set standards in how tutelas ought to be decided across the country. For that reason, I analyze both reviewed decisions and lower level decisions where possible. Information about the South African cases (1996–2016) come from the South African Constitutional Court’s (SACC) website, the Southern African Legal Information Institute, NGO reports, and case law books.⁹

While both the CCC and the SACC have been lauded as among the most progressive, rights-protective courts in the world, they have taken on significantly different workloads. On average, the CCC hears 243 constitutional abstract review cases, or “c-cases,” in addition to reviewing 709 tutelas, or “t-cases,” each year. Because t-cases comprise a much larger portion of the CCC’s work and because a much larger portion of t-cases than c-cases involve social rights claims, I focus on t-cases.¹⁰ Since the early 2000s, social rights claims have made up somewhere between about 47% and 65% of all tutelas each year in Colombia. In contrast, the SACC hears about 30 cases per year. In South Africa, social rights cases reflect between zero and nearly 20% of all SACC cases each year.

Beyond these differences in total volume of cases, we also see differences in the types of social rights claims advanced in each country. In Colombia, health rights tutelas have emerged as the most common type of social rights claim—and at times, these claims have even eclipsed all other types of tutela claims. For example, in 2008, Colombians filed just under 345,000 tutela claims, of which about 143,000 involved the right to health. The next most common claim involved the right to receive a response to a petition request, at about 113,000. Figure 1 shows the nationwide variation in social rights tutela claims between 2003 and 2014. While health claims remain the most common, other types of social rights claims have increased in frequency.¹¹ In South Africa, housing rights claims are by far the most common of the 204 social rights cases across the High Court, Supreme Court of Appeal, and Constitutional Court levels, as demonstrated in Figure 2. Although the number of claims differs from year to year, no other claim rivals housing. These trends hold when examining social rights cases at the SACC level independently.¹²

Figure 1.

Number of social rights tutelas in Colombia, 2003–2014.

Figure 2.

Number of social rights cases in South Africa, 1996–2016.

There is substantial variation in the form that legal mobilization for social rights takes in each country. In Colombia, the tutela encourages individual claimants to make relatively unmediated, decentralized claims. My sample of tutelas reviewed by the CCC shows that nearly 85% were individual claims. The tutela procedure does not require that claimants advance a formal legal argument, merely that they suggest that their rights have been violated. In theory, the tutela can be presented directly to a judge without any mediation, though, in practice, potential claimants may seek assistance from legal clinics or NGOs, government human rights offices such as the Defensoría del Pueblo or the Personería,¹³ or private individuals.

In South Africa, on the contrary, the applicant named in a social rights claim is generally a collective actor, such as a social movement or NGO, or residents of a particular parcel of land, or unrelated applicants who are affected by the same problem. Furthermore, constitutional rights claims tend to be both heavily mediated and heavily centralized, with some combination of NGOs, legal clinics, movement organizations, and/or lawyers offering pro bono legal services being involved. This type of claims-making is encouraged by institutional rules that require the use of two types of lawyers over the course of a lengthy, costly litigation campaign. As such, a traditional support structure becomes an almost necessary feature of legal mobilization for social rights in South Africa.

Explaining These Patterns: Manufacturing Opportunity Within Constraints

So why does claims-making congregate around the right to health in Colombia and the right to housing in South Africa? The subsequent sections of this article take up this question, demonstrating the importance of the social construction of legal grievances and judicial receptivity through public exposure to problems. They also highlight how the way legal professionals came to understand which rights were judicially enforceable coincided with the way the general population came to understand which of their rights were most claimable in the formal legal sphere.

Health and Housing in Colombia

The formal rules regulating the tutela procedure help mitigate the need for a traditional support structure (Wilson, 2009). Even so, societal actors help to shape legal claims-making. In the case of health claims, actors not usually associated with the legal system, such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies, have helped to cement the understanding that access to health care is a fundamentally legal issue among claimants. The influx of legal claims related to the right to health exposed judges to the extent of the health care system’s inefficiencies and inequities. Subsequently, judges began to reinterpret the meaning of the right to health, expanding rights protections in the process and encouraging further claims-making—in effect creating a positive feedback loop. Housing-related claims did not emerge with frequency, and societal actors related to the provision and regulation of housing did not see value in offloading service-provision onto the legal system, while those related to the provision and regulation of health did. Problems with access to health care became understood as legal grievances, while problems with access to adequate housing did not.

By examining patterns of tutela claims rather than taking an individual case as the unit of analysis, I reveal two key incentive structures in the realm of health rights claims. On one hand, individual citizens found practical incentives to file tutela claims, and on the other, insurance and pharmaceutical companies found monetary incentives to encourage the use of the tutela procedure. These incentive structures spurred changes in beliefs about how law could and should be used in the realm of health care. Two primary incentives motivated individual citizens. First, the massive yet uneven expansion of the health care system generated many potential grievances, as citizens gained access in theory (if not delivery in practice) to more and more services and developed a greater sense of entitlement to those services. Second, individual citizens came to understand the filing of tutelas as what one must do to receive health care services, and the relatively low cost of the tutela procedure allowed many citizens to file claims.

The main monetary incentive motivating insurance companies came about because under certain circumstances, the state would help to pay for medicines and procedures out of an established fund called the Fondo de Solidaridad y Garantía, relieving the insurance company of that duty, after the filing of a tutela. The idea behind this fund was to ensure that individuals would not be inhibited from accessing the medicines or procedures they needed simply because of a gap in coverage, yet the system was particularly susceptible to fraud and manipulation by actors in the health sphere who could deny access to a medical service that should have been covered and suggest that the patient file a tutela (Lamprea, 2015).¹⁴ While some insurance companies have better reputations than others on these matters (and some seem to perform better than their reputations would suggest), the general understanding is that the health care sphere is characterized by mismanagement, understaffing, fraud, and corruption. It is unclear exactly how frequently this kind of fraudulent activity occurs (though news reports suggest it has not necessarily been uncommon), but it is less important for my account that this behavior was, in fact, pervasive than that it is viewed as pervasive and that the behavior of insurance companies was interpreted as encouraging the use of the tutela in the realm of health.

Relatedly, Lamprea (2015) has documented the existence of financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and patients’ organizations engaged in the filing of tutela claims with the hopes of expanding the scope of covered medications. These kinds of connections can be interpreted as a manipulation of the tutela process, but they also reflect the convergence of interests between patients who need specific medications and companies that would like to increase access to and the purchasing of those same drugs. Regardless of the interpretation, we see a pathway through which pharmaceutical companies encourage the use of the tutela with respect to the right to health.

Alejandro Gaviria, the Minister of Health from 2012 to 2018, summarized the factors that influenced the increased use of the tutela for health claims as follows:

People started to see in the tutela a way to expand the benefits plan one by one. For patients very sick with cancer, the basic plan did not include the medication they needed, so they would go before a judge . . . I believe that this is the first dimension. And the basic plan was never updated [early on]. The tutela was a way to update [the plan] and [get it to] include [the medicines you needed]. I believe that there is a second point that has to do with collective learning. Society and, above all, lawyers learned that this was the way to do things. And then there were agents among the pharmaceutical industry who began to see in the tutela a way to incorporate the latest innovations into the health system and [in the process] capture public resources.¹⁵

As a result, the tutela and the health care system came to be inextricably linked. Furthermore, as noted in Taylor (2018), citizens commonly report that “[u]nfortunately, in Colombia, to access health services, you have to file tutelas,” and “[e]verything happens through the tutela” (p. 359). In response to this perception, the Constitutional Court ruled that the tutela cannot be a required part of the process of obtaining health care in 2007 (C-950/07). That the Court felt the need to issue such a declaration indicates the prevalence of the view that the tutela was a necessary part of accessing health care. Because of the way the health care system became judicialized, problems related to access to health became understood as legal grievances.

The argument is not that in every case these insurance and pharmaceutical companies explicitly call on individuals to file tutela claims (though sometimes that does happen), but that a generalized linkage of health care and the tutela has emerged, that the combination of incentives for insurance and pharmaceutical companies and incentives for individuals reinforces the understanding of health as a legal issue. These incentives are particularly influential considering the dominant form of legal mobilization in Colombia. The understanding that one must file a legal claim to have access to health services would be less likely to prompt litigation in a setting where litigation is costly and time-consuming.

An analysis of housing rights claims demonstrates that the expansion of rights claims present in the realm of health was not inevitable. The official data on tutela claims nationwide do not include disaggregated information on claims to the right to housing. Instead, housing appears in the “other socioeconomic rights” category. That the Defensoría del Pueblo does not tabulate housing rights claims is evidence of their relative infrequency. To examine housing rights claims more closely, I turn to my random sample of tutela claims scraped from the Constitutional Court’s website. This sample indicates that between 1992 and 2016, only 3.4% of all reviewed tutelas claimed the right to housing, of which the Court accepted 60.5%¹⁶ (compared with 25.1% pertaining to the right to health, of which the Court accepted 72.8%). The first of these housing rights tutelas, T-423/92, dealt with invasores, or squatters, who remained on rented property even after their lease had ended. Despite acknowledging the country’s housing deficit, the three-judge panel rejected the claim, arguing that the right to housing had to be sought though legal means, that the right to housing was not a fundamental right (therefore falling outside the competence of the tutela), and that “the termination of a lease cannot be considered as a violation of the right to housing.”¹⁷ The Court also rejected the only other housing rights tutela it reviewed in 1992 (T-598/92), again pointing to the nonfundamental status of the right to housing.

The most well-known set of legal claims related to the right to housing involved the system of home financing (Unidad de Poder Adquisitivo Constante or UPAC). Interviewees, including those currently working at the Constitutional Court, consistently referred to the UPAC cases when asked about the right to housing and often failed to identify any other housing rights cases. Initially in the wake of the UPAC crisis, citizens organized, marched, and brought tutela claims in the wake the UPAC crisis (Uprimny, 2007). Nevertheless, as Rueda (2010) notes, these tutelas were not decided in favor of the claimants, with the CCC finding “that an eventual breach of the right to housing was not enough to award protection through [the] mínimo vital” standard (p. 46). In 1999, the Court decided an abstract review case related to UPAC (C-747/99). The Court declared the UPAC system unconstitutional and held that the central bank, not the market, should determine interest rates. Interestingly, two justices expressed hesitancy about issuing such a decision, stating,

The reluctance or incompetence of the relevant organs of state—which should not be tolerated by the people, who can appeal at all times to the instruments of democratic participation—cannot be offered as an excuse for the Court to intervene in the determination or elimination of a public policy, outside of its original function of the review of constitutionality.¹⁸

While the other justices did not share this disinclination, their decisions in tutela claims suggest that they, too, saw the tutela as an inappropriate tool to raise claims related to UPAC specifically and housing more generally. Some commentators have suggested that the UPAC cases had a demobilizing impact on claims-making related to housing rights.¹⁹ Furthermore, not only did judges indicate that they would not respond favorably to tutela claims related to UPAC, but financial organizations did not promote the filing of these claims (in contrast to pharmaceutical and insurance companies in the realm of health).

Still, it is not immediately clear why other kinds of housing claims did not follow a path similar to that of health claims. According to UN-Habitat (2013), in 1990, 31.2% of urban-dwelling Colombians lived in “slum areas” (pp. 148–149), a percentage that dropped to 14.3% by 2009 (compared with a change from 46.2% to 23.0% in South Africa). Thus, there existed a population that could have made claims on the basis of housing inadequacy and could have connected those claims about housing to dignity (which incidentally mirrors the types of arguments put forward in South Africa about the right to adequate housing). Whether or not judges would accept these arguments is another story, but it is striking that these kinds of claims have been largely absent in the Colombian context.²⁰

Judicial decision-making related to social rights tutelas has changed over time, with judges first rejecting claims outright, before accepting claims on the basis of the conexidad doctrine (where a violation of one right signifies a violation to another, fundamental right, because the two rights are connected in the concrete case) or the mínimo vital doctrine (where a violation of one right indicates that the absolute minimum conditions necessary for a dignified life are not met), and finally declaring the right to health to be fundamental in itself (and therefore directly claimable with the tutela). The expansion of justiciability did not occur as quickly or as fully with other social rights as it did with health rights, though these early decisions during the more experimental period of claims-making did not explicitly privilege health. While lines of argumentation and interpretation changed, this process appears to be primarily one driven by CCC justices. Judges relied on general arguments about the status of nonfundamental rights, rather than on the specific arguments related to health developed by civil society. The changing standards that judges looked to in adjudicating social rights claims reflect sociolegal values, specifically interpretations of the meaning of justice, dignity, and a dignified life in the Colombian context.

Eduardo Cifuentes, a justice in the Constitutional Court from its inception to 2000, notes that one of the two major challenges facing “the Court was for rights to mean more power for the weak . . . [F]or that reason, the extension of borders of economic, social and cultural and fundamental rights was guided by the Court directly.”²¹ Furthermore, as Rodolfo Arango, a clerk during the first years of the Court, recalls, it was the Court itself that played a pedagogical role, disseminating information to potential claimants:

From the beginning of the Court, we had a very, very aggressive strategy of delivering the decisions and explaining them very pedagogically, directly to the media . . . every week on the front page of the newspaper [you read] a surprising decision, one that protected someone’s rights. We did that intentionally. Journalists were always visiting the Court, visiting our offices, asking what decisions would come out that week that they could write about in the newspaper.²²

The idea here was to promote a closer connection between everyday citizens and the courts, not necessarily to encourage specific rights claims. Thus, it is not immediately clear, if these general arguments about the importance of social rights motivated Constitutional Court judges and if judges reached out to the public generally rather than by inviting specific kinds of cases, why there are such stark differences in established patterns of legal mobilization around the rights to health and housing.

The exposure mechanism helps to explain the differential expansion of rights protections. One clerk put it this way:

It’s a bit like the citizens were knocking on the door to see what the judges were saying. We were very receptive and we opened the door completely . . . They knocked on the door with many cases of many issues and we as judges opened it [to health claims].

When pressed as to why the Court would have “opened the door” to health claims more readily than other social rights claims, she referred to the state of crisis of the health care system, to the “painfulness” of the situation, and the fact that “we suffer physical pain equally, we suffer the pain of seeing a sick relative equally, and we are also equally victims of the health system.”²³ Another clerk summarized that the “tutela for social rights [emerged] out of pure necessity of the people, and [they] found that the Constitutional Court was receptive to the needs of the people.”²⁴ As judges continued to be exposed to health claims, they became more comfortable with them and even identified with claimants, and they became more aware of the extent of the problems with the health care system, and more convinced that these types of claims could or should be resolved by the Court.

Judges became convinced that these types of claims should be resolved by the Court not simply because of the continued filing of health claims (though my sample of tutelas shows that between 1992 and 2016, roughly 25% were health claims) but also because the issue of access to health care comported with judges’ understanding of contemporary Colombia sociolegal values. In other words, judges viewed access to health care as central to a dignified life (as evidenced by their willingness to accept health rights tutela claims with the mínimo vital and conexidad standards). While my interviewees referred to objective factors, such as having sick relatives, the process of recognizing problems and identifying with claimants is contingent and subjective; these judges just as easily could have referenced not health-related issues but housing-related issues as what tied Colombians together, holding instead that “at a minimum, we all need a roof over our heads.” They did not, however, share this interpretation of housing and relatively few housing rights claims came before the Court.²⁵ The shift from experimental to established claims-making featured the growth and acceptance of health rights claims—as potential claimants came to understand health through the lens of the law and judges came to understand health as an issue that should be handled by the courts. That same process did not occur for housing rights claims.

Housing and Health in South Africa

Turning now to South Africa, the dominant form of legal mobilization features collective claimants who advance centralized, formalized, and heavily mediated claims. This form of legal mobilization results from the institutional rules governing how one can advance a claim in the South African legal system (i.e., by conforming to technical standards of legal argumentation and weathering lengthy and costly court proceedings), and renders proactive legal mobilization in the absence of a support structure—and its financial resources—highly unlikely. The basic support structure for social rights claims in South Africa can be divided in two: on one hand, an organization or movement specific to the issue at hand, and on the other, the emergent postapartheid human rights legal elite and the NGOs they created. A problem may begin with an individual, but by the time that individual engages the legal system, several other applicants (including organizations) will have been joined to the complaint and two sets of legal professionals (attorneys and advocates) will have become involved in the expression of the legal claim. This is true regardless of the issue area, though legal mobilization related to the right to housing has far surpassed mobilization related to the right to health. Although more specialized organizations focusing on particular constitutional rights exist today, in the early years following the end of apartheid, the organizations involved in providing legal and material support for social rights cases tended to be involved in the broad provision of legal services.

Of the 15 health rights cases I identified across the High, Supreme, and Constitutional Court levels since 1996, seven focused on claims related to HIV/AIDS, three of which related to access to antiretroviral medication while in prison. The other cases are difficult to group and dealt with issues ranging from access to dialysis to the legal regime governing surrogacy to the constitutionality of the National Health Act. The two earliest health cases emerged in 1997. One, Van Biljon (1997), ended at the Cape High Court with a court order protecting the constitutional right of prisoners living with HIV to receive “adequate medical treatment,” including prescribed antiretroviral drugs at state expense.

The other, Soobramoney (1997), was the first social rights case heard by the Constitutional Court. The applicant, Mr. Soobramoney, sought to claim an individual right to access health care services in light of his renal failure he and his inability to obtain dialysis from private medical facilities due to the cost. Of course, rights claims are not made unopposed. In this case, the state pointed to its limited resources in the health sphere as a reason why the Court should not second-guess its health policy and why it should reject Mr. Soobramoney’s claim. Ultimately, the Court accepted the state’s argument and clarified that individual claims to the right to health would not supersede broader health policy. In concrete terms, this meant that the Court refused to direct a state-run medical facility to provide Mr. Soobramoney with dialysis treatments, considering the resource limitations faced by the state and the nature of Mr. Soobramoney’s illness. The decision was both highly public and highly contentious. In fact, one former clerk who worked at the Court at the time of the decision recalled,

You know, it was emotionally charged. Clerks got phone calls to say “you killed Soobramoney” . . . One of my good friends got . . . repeated phone calls from somebody. And, you know that they read the judgment and I think he died two hours later.²⁶

This decision indicated that one cannot claim the right to health in cases like these, and when combined with the already difficult process of bringing claims before the Court, it made claims-making related to the individual right to health even less likely.

The next health rights case, Treatment Action Campaign (2002), to come before the SACC found much more success. Much has been written about this case, but, in short, the Court found that the state had acted unreasonably in limiting the distribution of a drug shown to inhibit mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The decision required that the state roll out a full program to distribute the drug, rather than simply pilot the program at a few medical facilities.

Although the courts in South Africa were willing, at least at times, to accept claims to the right to health, health did not become judicialized in the way it did in Colombia. Notably, relatively few health claims have been advanced, especially outside the realm of HIV/AIDS, despite a flagging public health care system, which has been characterized as being “in a state of crisis, with much of the public health care infrastructure run down and dysfunctional as a result of underfunding, mismanagement, and neglect” (Mayosi & Benatar, 2014, p. 1346). One might think that the taboo status of HIV/AIDS might have inhibited claims-making in South Africa, at least early on in the 1990s. However, even if HIV/AIDS contestation was initially less likely because the issue is associated with taboo subjects (Gauri & Lieberman, 2006), that does not explain the dearth of overall health claims. What we see, in fact, is that HIV/AIDS claims surpass other kinds of health claims, such as those related to access to medications or procedures, which have been quite common in the Colombian context. Furthermore, we might have expected, given the South African government’s reticence to develop policy to confront the AIDS epidemic, to see even greater levels of legal claims-making. While there are seven health rights cases pertaining to HIV/AIDS (and only eight other health rights cases), neither HIV/AIDS specifically nor health more generally became judicialized in the way that housing did.

The Constitutional Court has been receptive to housing rights claims, particularly those claims related to evictions, beginning with the first housing rights case to come before it, Grootboom (2000). In Grootboom, the Court found the state’s housing policy to be unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional, as it neglected to provide for those “in desperate need.” The Court handed down this decision over the objections of the state that it had limited funds to address the housing crisis and that the Court should not second-guess its housing policy decisions—the same objections that the Court had been receptive to in the Soobramoney case, which it had heard just a few years earlier. The Grootboom decision set off a chain of cases related to the right to housing in the context of evictions. One former clerk currently working as a litigator at a Johannesburg-based NGO described the development of the right to housing as follows:

Under apartheid, it was illegal to be a squatter, and you could be kicked out and you could be thrown in jail . . . [Now] you [can] evict someone, but only with a court order, and only if it’s equitable . . . Built into the right is if eviction is going to lead to homelessness, the state must provide you with temporary alternative accommodation. And over the past 20 years, that has been expanded. It’s not just if you’re flood victim the state must provide this accommodation, it’s also if the state evicts you. Then the next step is when the state evicts you from private land. Then the next step, if a private owner evicts you, also you have this right. And now we’re getting to the content of what that alternative accommodation looks like . . . So we’re seeing—and what’s so lovely and unexpected—is the Court has started writing case law on this, kind of like a handbook for litigators . . . The jurisprudence has developed to such a level that the courts are now writing, “Judges, when they decide this issue, have to do X, Y, Z.”²⁷

Thus, there has been a steady expansion of the understanding of the scope of the right to housing, built step-by-step, from emergency or crisis protections to everyday protections. One lawyer explained,

in housing, the area where there’s been the greatest success is that evictions have been made very much more difficult through the Constitution and through very skilled and energetic lawyers who had pushed the boundaries of the Constitution beyond what anyone imagined at the time it was written.²⁸

Social movements organized by shack-dwellers, like Abahlali baseMjondolo, have adopted rights-based language in contesting evictions, and even have posters that detail the steps necessary for evictions to proceed lawfully posted in their offices. As such, the issue of housing—or at least evictions—appears to have been thoroughly judicialized in the South African context, with housing understood through the lens of law (unlike in Colombia). In fact, most respondents seemed to take it almost as natural that there would be so many housing rights cases, stating, for instance, “I think that the starting point, that people need a home, need a roof over their heads, is a really significant one.”²⁹ That one needs a home is true everywhere, but legal mobilization for the right to housing does not occur everywhere there are housing gaps.

But why were judges so receptive to these legal claims about evictions, in contrast to other social rights claims, even though the legacy of apartheid-era social exclusion transcended the issue of housing? Fowkes (2016), a former clerk at the Constitutional Court, notes, “Somehow, the Court is seen as being on both sides of [a] dichotomy, with the very same judges apparently contextual, progressive guardians of social justice at one moment and closed-minded, heartless formalists the next” (p. 2). He attributes these oppositional assessments to the early Constitutional Court’s preference for a “constitution-building” approach, which views the executive as a partner in rights protection rather than as an adversary, and which encourages deference to the other branches of government where possible. Interviews with former Constitutional Court judges and other former clerks affirm this understanding of the Court.³⁰ The Court was not necessarily inclined in general to take interventionist decisions, or to demand that the state handle the housing question in any specific way, though one lawyer concluded that

one of the reasons the Grootboom case had the outcome [it did] was that some of the judges were so relieved to see a socio-economic rights case which they could support . . . [When we were arguing the case,] we kept on saying, “Of course this is not Soobramoney. Oh no, it’s not Soobramoney.”³¹

Again, though, the question of why judges would have understood the Grootboom case as “supportable” in contrast to the Soobramoney case remains. Both cases entailed positive obligations on the state—whether providing access to dialysis machines or temporary alternative accommodation.

As was the case with health rights in Colombia, nonstate actors pushed for protections, and they were more intimately involved in these litigation efforts than were their Colombian counterparts, but we do not necessarily see South African judges taking up the arguments preferred by civil society activists. In the Grootboom case, one lawyer remembers, “The judges got really agitated about [the] ‘who first’ [question] and said, ‘Well, how can we just reward people because they’ve got clever lawyers?’”³² While the Court ended up deciding in favor of Ms. Grootboom, it continued to show skepticism regarding the expansive protections called for by lawyers and NGOs. This skepticism comes through most clearly in the repeated rejection of the minimum core approach to social rights.³³ Lawyers frequently advanced arguments in favor of a minimum core in oral arguments and in amicus briefs, but the Constitutional Court judges remained steadfastly opposed to applying that approach.³⁴

As Fowkes (2016) holds, “New legal protections can become settled and entrenched, and their judicial enforcement can become easier and more routine, but this is not inevitable” (p. 132). The Court’s willingness to decide in favor of Ms. Grootboom did not imply that it would necessarily continue to expand housing rights protections. The Court could have decided in subsequent cases that the right to housing would only imply justiciable positive obligations in the context of emergencies or could have limited the applicability of housing in some other way. After the fact, judicial decisions may seem as if they were inevitable, but this perception is not an accurate one.

Legal protections can become entrenched through the continued exposure of judges to particular kinds of legal claims and the problems they implicate, especially when judges interpret these claims as consonant with contemporary sociolegal values. Again, the exposure mechanism refers to the process by which continued experience with claims related to a specific grievance cumulatively inform judges about an issue, causing them to become comfortable with the issue and to identify with claimants. The process results in an increased receptivity of judges to claims pertaining to that issue area. We see this clearly in the realm of housing in South Africa, where judges connected the specific issue of access to housing with the general value of human dignity. One former clerk noted,

Housing cases are numerous at this point in the jurisprudence, in the High Court and the [Constitutional] Court, and I think that maybe it’s just getting judges and courts comfortable in that terrain so that the more of a particular kind of case they see, the more comfortable they become with the numbers and statistics and so on . . . Especially in the [Johannesburg] courts they’ve seen it again and again and again so they’re becoming more comfortable. I don’t know . . . [but] that’s something that I suspect.³⁵

This view is consistent with hands-on interventions undertaken by the Court in housing cases such as Joe Slovo (2009), which specified “the exact time and manner and conditions” of the eviction, including precise directives about the alternative accommodation to be provided to those subject to eviction.³⁶ The existence of a robust support structure around housing issues and the fact that eviction orders must be granted by judges meant that judges would continue to be exposed to housing rights cases. Another former clerk pointed to this support structure and the history of land and housing issues in South Africa as being particularly influential on judicial receptivity of these kinds of claims:

There’s a long history of land and housing litigation as kind of an anti-apartheid move . . . A lot of the liberal and progressive judges who went on to High Courts and the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court identified with these cases as sort of, as sites of progressive fighting. I think [that] is one reason. There’s been incredibly organized and coordinated litigation and planning around housing rights specifically. . . There’s this kind of feedback happening between an issue that is obviously quite dire on the ground . . . [and] good organization among clients, lawyers, and receptiveness on the part of judges.³⁷

Yet another former clerk noted that the problem of inadequate housing was visible in such a way that judges were exposed to it, that “even judges can see them for themselves.”³⁸ The notion that judges can see and identify with the problem of housing echoes the idea that in Colombia judges could imagine themselves as claimants in a health rights case. Importantly, both are subjective interpretations described as if they were objective facts.

Still, exposure is not enough on its own to precipitate judicial receptivity. Judges must also have the sense that the kind of rights violation in question is incompatible with contemporary sociolegal values—in this case, the value of human dignity is crucial. In early health rights cases, including Soobramoney and Treatment Action Campaign, South African judges suggested that while human dignity remained central to the postapartheid South African legal order, the link between a difficulty with access to health care might not be an infringement on dignity (in Soobramoney) or they simply did not consider dignity as a fundamental part of the legal analysis (in Treatment Action Campaign).

In contrast, in early housing rights decisions, human dignity featured prominently. For example, in Grootboom, Justice Yacoob wrote, “The case brings home the harsh reality that the Constitution’s promise of dignity and equality for all remains for many a distant dream.” Here, dignity and access to adequate housing are understood as necessarily connected, and this understanding combined with exposure spurred judicial receptivity to housing claims. This receptivity involved not only hearing housing rights cases but also issuing interventionist decisions, rather than leaving the issue to be resolved by the executive or legislature (even if those same judges otherwise embrace a philosophy of judicial deference). These decisions, particularly as they detailed what one lawyer quoted above described as “a handbook for litigators,” served as cues for potential claimants and incentivized further legal claims-making related to the right to housing, forming a positive feedback loop. This constellation of factors—judicial receptivity, societal support, and the judicialized understanding of housing—has not fully emerged with respect to other social rights issues.

Interestingly, the ways Colombian lawyers talk about the right to health and the ways South African lawyers talk about the right to housing are remarkably similar. As one lawyer and former clerk in Colombia put it, “among the socioeconomic rights, the only one that is actually enforceable in a way that you can actually identify the right with a treatment, a drug, something tangible, is the right to health. The only one.”³⁹ Now consider a South African lawyer and former clerk’s view:

I think housing just created a particularly unique gap because it’s such a negative effect. It’s leave that person alone, [that] was the starting point, not give them healthcare, not give them special healthcare, not feed them, not educate them, just simply leave them where they are. You know, that’s the difference.⁴⁰

Both of these assessments make sense in their national contexts, but what seems inevitable, commonsense, or natural in one country loses that quality when placed in comparative perspective. The social right that is understood to be most enforceable, or most appropriate for judges to enforce, in South Africa is housing, while in Colombia, it is health. These understandings held by legal professionals coincide with the understandings of the general population about which of their rights are most claimable.

Conclusion

This article examines differential legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa, advancing two arguments about how societal actors influence legal mobilization in ways often unacknowledged or underspecified in existing accounts. First, I argue that societal actors not only support claimants in their efforts to seek redress by providing financial and technical resources, but they also actively participate in the social construction of grievances. Societal actors help to construct broad understandings of existing problems as both objectionable and claimable in the legal sphere—They encourage citizens to view specific realities through the lens of the law. Second, I identify another mechanism through which societal actors influence judicial receptivity to particular claims: public exposure to problems. The persistence and/or increase of particular kinds of claims informs judges about an issue, encouraging them to become (more) comfortable with the scope of the problem and to identify with claimants. Over time, this continued exposure to claims triggers a consideration or reconsideration of the correct legal response to the underlying issue, particularly when judges view the issue as comporting with contemporary sociolegal values—in the cases analyzed here, when they interpret the issue as central to a dignified life. Together, as my constructivist account of legal mobilization shows, these processes result in a positive feedback loop, with sustained legal claims-making prompting judicial receptivity, and judicial receptivity inspiring additional claims-making. When this positive feedback loop emerges, we see a shift from experimental to established patterns of claims-making.

Cross-national, cross-sector comparisons help to establish how different kinds of societal actors may play similar roles in influencing legal mobilization across contexts. In Colombia, health came to be understood through a legal lens, with incentives for potential claimants combining with incentives for actors involved in the provision of health care services to encourage the use of the tutela. Judges—influenced by exposure to these health rights claims—became more receptive to those claims, further incentivizing the continued use of the tutela in the realm of health. Housing rights claims did not follow a similar path. In contrast, housing rights claims have been most common in South Africa. Societal actors helped to construct a widespread understanding that housing was a legal issue, instead of simply a personal or social one. Furthermore, the exposure of judges to the problem of housing, through both continued legal claims and personal experience, encouraged judges to be more receptive to claims to the right to housing relative to other social rights claims. The argument here is not that judges in South Africa are unaware of deep problems in the health care sector, or that judges in Colombia are unaware of housing issues, but that this awareness sits at an academic level and is less influential for decision-making, while housing in South Africa takes on a more visceral quality and is understood as inexorably connected to human dignity. The same applies to health in Colombia, because of the way judges have been exposed to these issues.

Again, the material existence of a problem does not imply that it will necessarily be recognized as a grievance, and the recognition of a grievance does not indicate by itself how or where or by whom that grievance will be expressed. There is no one-to-one-to-one translation of problems into grievances into claims. Hypothetically, health rights claims could have become most common in South Africa and housing rights claims in Colombia, or both types of claims could have emerged as equally common in both countries. Patterns of legal claims-making express not only underlying material conditions but also the social construction of legal grievances. The beliefs that actors have about the problems in their lives, specifically about which problems are legally grievable, have social roots. Likewise, judicial decision-making emerges not from abstract reasoning but is influenced by social context, including through public exposure to problems.

A holistic examination of legal mobilization reveals the recursive, interconnected nature of grievances, legal opportunity, and judicial behavior. Attention to this interplay is key for understanding the contestation about and expansion of access to social goods throughout much of the world. The consequences of this kind of expansion of access to social welfare goods are largely unknown. Ultimately, constitutional rights offer equal access to all citizens on paper, yet real access is determined by the ability of citizens to make claims to these goods, either as individuals or as part of a group. In other words, legal recognitions offer an indirect route to social incorporation and to social policy change, one that might reify rather than offer redress for preexisting disadvantage. This article takes an initial step toward examining these consequences.

Supplemental Material

Appendices – Supplemental material for On the Social Construction of Legal Grievances: Evidence From Colombia and South Africa

Supplemental material, Appendices for On the Social Construction of Legal Grievances: Evidence From Colombia and South Africa by Whitney K. Taylor in Comparative Political Studies

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received support from the Cornell University Graduate School, Latin American Studies Program, Institute for African Development, and Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

ORCID iD

Whitney K. Taylor

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online at the CPS website

Notes

Author Biography

Whitney K. Taylor is an assistant professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. Her research, which focuses on the intersection between law and contentious politics, has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, and Law & Society Review.

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