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Human Rights in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization: The Alien Tort Claims Act and Grassroots Mobilization in Doe v. Unocal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Cheryl Holzmeyer
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Abstract

This article examines a widely publicized corporate accountability and human rights case filed by Burmese plaintiffs and human rights litigators in 1996 under the Alien Tort Claims Act in U.S. courts, Doe v. Unocal, in conjunction with the three main theoretical approaches to analyzing how law may matter for broader social change efforts: (1) legal realism, (2) Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and (3) legal mobilization. The article discusses interactions between Doe v. Unocal and grassroots Burmese human rights activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, including intersections with corporate accountability activism. It argues that a transnationally attuned legal mobilization framework, rather than legal realist or CLS approaches, is most appropriate to analyze the political opportunities and indirect effects of Doe v. Unocal and similar litigation in the context of neoliberal globalization. Further, this article argues that human rights discourse may serve as a common vocabulary and counterhegemonic resource for activists and litigators in cases such as Doe v. Unocal, contrary to overarching critiques of such discourse that emphasize only its hegemonic potentials in global governance regimes.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 271 - 304
Copyright
© 2009 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was supported in part by funding from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. I wish to thank the interviewees for sharing their time and insights. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Law & Society Review and LSR editor Carroll Seron for their insightful and helpful comments, which much improved the manuscript. Thanks to Lauren Edelman, Laura Enriquez, and Kim Voss for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

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