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From Protest to Perry: How Litigation Shaped the LGBT Movement's

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From Protest to Perry: How Litigation Shaped the LGBT Movement's From Protest to Perry: How Litigation Shaped the LGBT Movement’s Agenda Gwendolyn M. Leachman* This Article empirically examines how litigation shapes the substantive agenda of a social movement. Critical scholars have argued that movement lawyers, as professionals and elites, tend to substitute their own priorities for those of their clients. Yet lawyers and litigation can also influence a movement’s agenda through subtle, organizational dynamics rather than through the volitional, ethical choices made by movement lawyers. This Article reexamines critiques of civil rights lawyering through a case study of the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) rights. This case study draws on quantitative and qualitative analyses of original data from more than two decades of LGBT movement history. These analyses reveal that litigation garnered more news media coverage than other tactics and that the LGBT movement organizations that used litigation had a greater likelihood of survival than organizations that did not. These benefits made litigation the most visible * Copyright © 2014 Gwendolyn M. Leachman. Sears Law Fellow, Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, UCLA School of Law; J.D.; Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley. I am enormously grateful to my dissertation co-chairs, Catherine Albiston and Lauren Edelman, for their ongoing support and investment in this project and provision of years of insightful feedback. I also sincerely thank Laura Gómez and Scott Cummings for their exceptional mentorship and guidance in developing this paper. For their helpful comments, I thank Richard Abel, Scott Barclay, Luke Boso, Lee Carpenter, Maureen Carroll, Howard Erlanger, Andrew Flores, Jeff Kosbie, Pennie Leachman, Calvin Morrill, Julian Mortenson, Brent Nakamura, Douglas NeJaime, Jason Oh, Jenny Pizer, Joanna Schwartz, Jeff Selbin, Jordan Blair Woods, and Noah Zatz. Yang Liu and Timothy Han provided excellent research assistance. This project was made possible by research support from the National Science Foundation, the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies fellowship, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and the Williams Institute. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the LGBT and queer activists who generously participated in this research and continue to provide an unending source of inspiration in my life and work. 1667 1668 University of California, Davis [Vol. 47:1667 and established of all the LGBT movement’s tactics. In addition, LGBT protest organizations responded to the legal issues projected in the mainstream media to form their agendas, subtly redirecting those protest organizations away from their original priorities and toward legal goals. This Article makes a novel contribution to existing scholarship by exposing systemic processes that may privilege movement litigation relative to protest, elevating the issues being litigated to top movement priorities. Significant implications follow for theories of law and social change. The dominance of legal issues on the LGBT movement’s agenda marginalized movement demands for cultural transformation or structural change in favor of assimilationist goals, such as the right to marry, that translate well into formal legal claims. Understanding the dynamics revealed here, which allow litigation to set a social movement’s agenda, will help civil rights lawyers in the LGBT movement and beyond to provide more effective representation and to achieve more far-reaching social change. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1669 I. THE LGBT MOVEMENT IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ............. 1677 A. The Emergence of the LGBT Movement Mainstream ........ 1678 B. Queer Critiques of the LGBT Movement Mainstream ....... 1680 II. EXISTING FRAMEWORKS FOR INTERPRETING LITIGATION’S EFFECT ON SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ............................................ 1684 A. Critical Legal Scholarship on Lawyer Domination Within Social Movements ............................................................ 1685 B. Legal Mobilization Scholarship on Litigation Attracting Movement Resources ........................................................ 1687 C. “Discursive Opportunity” Theory and the Privileging of a Movement’s Legal Tactics and Agenda ............................. 1691 III. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE LEGALIZATION OF THE LGBT MOVEMENT ............................................................................ 1695 A. Visibility: Media Coverage of LGBT Movement Litigation 1697 B. Stability: Survival of LGBT Litigating Organizations ...... 1705 C. Agenda Setting: Litigation Defines the LGBT Movement’s Priorities ......................................................................... 1713 1. Differences Between Litigating, Protest, and Lobbying LGBT Organizations ................................. 1715 a. Litigating Organizations: Proactive Planning ...... 1719 b. Protest Organizations: Reactive Planning ............ 1727 c. Lobbying Organizations: Proactive and Reactive Planning .............................................................. 1734 2014] From Protest to Perry 1669 2. Litigation Sets the Protest Agenda ........................... 1737 a. Routine Production of Legal Events ...................... 1738 b. Focus on Law-Dominated Media Coverage .......... 1740 c. Cultural Legitimacy of Law ................................. 1741 IV. DISCUSSION ............................................................................ 1744 CONCLUSION..................................................................................... 1749 INTRODUCTION Legal scholars critical of the role of lawyers in social movements have long warned of the potential for litigation to transform and deradicalize a social movement’s agenda.1 Movement lawyers, the argument goes, dominate the attorney-client relationship in their pursuit of impact litigation, substituting their own legal priorities for the more radical goals of their activist clients.2 But litigation can also influence a social movement’s agenda through a subtler set of unintentional, organizational dynamics rather than through the volitional, ethical choices made by movement lawyers.3 This Article investigates how litigation and legal priorities may come to dominate a social movement’s agenda to the exclusion of more radical and transformative priorities. These dynamics are explored through a case study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) movement from 1985 to 2008. The case study uses quantitative and qualitative analyses of original data to examine how litigation may shape the substantive focus of movement activism. This research provides new insights into the structural and systemic factors that may privilege litigation over other social movement tactics and make the issues that are litigated the focus of activism outside the courtroom. Understanding the inadvertent (and often invisible) processes revealed here will help lawyers in the LGBT movement and in other civil rights 1 See, e.g., Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation, 85 YALE L.J. 470, 471-72 (1976) (noting how the ideals of lawyers may differ from the relief sought by victims of school segregation). 2 See JOEL F. HANDLER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM: A THEORY OF LAW REFORM AND SOCIAL CHANGE 25-26 (1978); MARK TUSHNET, THE NAACP’S LEGAL STRATEGY AGAINST SEGREGATED EDUCATION, 1925–1950, at 146 (1987); Bell, supra note 1, at 488; Mark Kessler, Legal Mobilization for Social Reform: Power and the Politics of Agenda Setting, 24 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 121, 137-38 (1990). 3 A growing body of legal scholarship recognizes that patterns of social privilege and subordination result from unintentional, organizational practices rather than overt strategic action. See Samuel R. Bagenstos, The Structural Turn and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law, 94 CALIF. L. REV. 1, 2 (2006). 1670 University of California, Davis [Vol. 47:1667 movements to provide more effective representation of marginalized communities. The LGBT movement is a particularly rich setting for examining the factors that foster intramovement consensus around legal issues as shared, first-order priorities. This movement comprises diverse, even oppositional activist communities. Although large, national civil rights organizations constitute the LGBT movement’s mainstream,4 a critical faction of grassroots and protest-based activists historically have taken a more confrontational approach. Radical protest groups that challenged the mainstream LGBT movement’s focus on formal legal equality5 diffused throughout the country in the early 1990s. Touting a radical, “queer” political identity,6 these protest groups articulated a set of structural goals, such as combating the widespread homophobia propagated by media images and religious organizations and transforming heterosexual-dominated public spaces.7 Yet despite queer groups’ radical rhetoric, the protest actions they organized ultimately came to focus on many of the same formal legal priorities that they critiqued.8 This Article aims to understand how these seemingly polarized factions within the LGBT movement have come to agree that 4 See infra Part III.C. 5 See Joshua Gamson, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma, 42 SOC. PROBS. 390, 394 (1995) (describing queer politics as a “rejection of civil rights strategies ‘in favor of . anti-assimilationist
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