Law and Social Change: How Reform Movements Leverage the Law

Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Harvard Law School and Department of History)
First-Year Seminar 71C    4 credits (spring term) 

Legal realists and critical theorists have long argued that the law is a byproduct of society. “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote. Focusing on the prospect of achieving racial justice through law, political science warned that law would never hover like a “protecting angel” over oppressed racial minorities. For it would always reflect the dominant social order and sympathy for outsiders should never be assumed. On the other hand, proponents of a Dynamic View of the U.S. Supreme Court argue that it has repeatedly been a catalyst of social change in the United States. Still others, asserting that the law is “everywhere,” decenter the Court and focus on the myriad ways, direct and indirect, that law, broadly defined, can be a tool of change.

This seminar defines law broadly; and it considers the idea of experience—including events and people external to the legal system—affecting the law and creating social change. It discusses how social movements—groups of citizens mobilized in support of a cause—deploy the Constitution and other types of rights talk to “frame” disputes and move forward their agendas. Seminar participants will discuss how movements crystallize grievances, mobilize supporters, demobilize antagonists, and attract bystander support by referencing constitutional rights and other ideas about law. It also considers the effectiveness of movements’ legal strategies. The seminar considers these questions in relation to several well-known social reform movement  —including abolitionism, the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, 20^th century populism, MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—as points of departure for discussion.  

Note: This is a Radcliffe First-Year Seminar and will include optional co-curricular activities related to the seminar topic. The seminar will meet on the Radcliffe campus, Knafel Center, room 104.