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The question of whether and how law plays a role in producing social change has received renewed scholarly attention, powered by research on the role of social movements in law making and the relation between court decisions and backlash. Reflecting the broader turn to empiricism within legal scholarship, this research either directly engages in or builds upon the empirical study of law in ways that chart exciting new scholarly directions — but also raise important conceptual and methodological questions. This essay explores these questions in an effort to frame what is at stake and guide future research. It makes three contributions.First, it offers a map of the law and social change field, suggesting how researchers across disciplines have asked a set of questions that can be understood as part of a coherent model in which law is viewed as both an “input” and “output” of social change campaigns. Within this model, debate centers on what factors cause lawyers and activists to turn to law as a tool of reform in the first instance (input analysis) and whether legal mobilization ultimately advances movement goals (output analysis). Focusing on the input side, the Essay next outlines how existing research presents a more nuanced story of legal mobilization than posited by the conventional view of rights claiming in court to advance underrepresented interests. In contrast to the traditional account of lawyers deploying litigation as a substitute for traditional politics, the input literature offers a more complex and dynamic account of the relationship of legal mobilization to political power; of lawyers to clients and constituencies; and of litigation to other legal and nonlegal social change strategies.Finally, the Essay turns to the output side to consider the multiple — and often contested — ways in which law may effect change. Here, it highlights an important challenge that empiricism poses to law and social change researchers: the challenge of evaluation. In particular, much of the debate about law and social change has centered on whether legal mobilization makes positive or negative contributions to reform efforts. As these debates become more informed by interdisciplinary research, it is useful to think about how the questions asked may shape the answers produced — and what this means for our understanding of law as a tool of transformative politics. Toward this end, the Essay identifies four key evaluative challenges — how to account for background conditions, select baselines, understand burdens of proof, and weigh counterfactuals — and offers some thoughts on how they might be addressed.
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