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In The Social Constitution, Whitney Taylor examines the conditions under which new constitutional rights become meaningful and institutionalized. Taylor introduces the concept of 'embedding' constitutional law to clarify how particular visions of law come to take root both socially and legally. Constitutional embedding can occur through legal mobilization, as citizens understand the law in their own way and make legal claims - or choose not to - on the basis of that understanding, and as judges decide whether and how to respond to legal claims. These interactions ultimately construct the content and strength of the constitutional order. Taylor draws on more than a year of fieldwork across Colombia and multiple sources of data, including semi-structured interviews, original surveys, legal documents, and participation observation. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details

Legal and social movement scholars have long puzzled over the role of movements in moving, being moved by, and changing the meanings of the law. But for decades, these two strands of scholarship only dovetailed at their edges, in the work of a few far-seeing scholars. The fields began to more productively merge before and after the turn of the century. In this Element, the authors take an interactive approach to this problem and sketch four mechanisms that seem promising in effecting a true fusion: legal mobilization, legal-political opportunity structure, social construction, and movement-countermovement interaction. The Element also illustrates the workings and interactions of these four mechanisms from two examples of the authors' work: the campaign for same-sex marriage in the United States and social constitutionalism in South Africa.