法律動員研究

Legal Mobilization

法律動員研究近年來在法與社會研究的重要性日增，重要的法與社會及法與政治手冊也都有專章介紹法律動員研究。法律動員研究的起源與美國政治發展息息相關。自Brown v. Board of Education及Roe v. Wade判決所帶來的成功，使得以公益訴訟為主要手段的團體有意識地以訴訟策略促成社會改革，這樣的策略促使了許多社會學者、政治學者以及法與社會學者開始發展理論架構，並大量投入觀察、分析和理解這些訴訟和權利倡議的實踐。本文耙梳並介紹西方文獻的法律動員研究，首先討論法律動員概念的定義，其廣泛性的定義內涵，雖促成了研究數量的增加，但也因此發展成了兩個取向不同的分支，呈現了相當歧異的樣貌。本文也介紹美國以外的法律動員研究，繼而討論臺灣法律動員研究的發展，最後展望未來，本文預料隨著憲法訴訟法的施行，法律動員研究將蓬勃發展。

The increasing importance of the research on legal mobilization in the field of law and society studies cannot be overlooked. It is now almost impossible to imagine any research companion or handbook in the fields of law and society or law and politics would be published without including a chapter on legal mobilization. The burgeoning legal mobilization research pertains to the increased utilization of litigations by social activism in the United States and around the world. Since progressive camps won the landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade in the US Supreme Court, more and more organizations aiming to advance their social reform agenda had purposefully taken on the path of litigations. The social phenomenon of the common tactics has interested many sociologists, political scientists as well as socio-legal scholars to put in resources to know why social groups use law and rights as a strategy. The aggregative empirical works or case studies of legal mobilization have helped to develop fruitful theoretical frameworks to analyze this form of litigations and rights advocacy. Through reviewing the literature on legal mobilization, this article first discusses the diversified definition and scope of legal mobilization among scholars in this field. The different definitions and core concerns of legal mobilization had generated two separated yet equally important approaches to the understanding and analysis of mobilization of law: one from a microscopic and interpersonal perspective and the other from a macroscopic and structural perspective. This article further reviews Taiwan’s research on legal mobilization in the past decade, including a few groundbreaking articles and master theses, and in the final part gives suggestions for future research directions on Taiwan’s legal mobilization research.