Book Review: The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective

Date01 September 2000
AuthorCarl F. Stychin
Published date01 September 2000
DOI10.1177/096466390000900310
Subject MatterArticles
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BOOK REVIEWS
CHARLES R. EPP, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in
Comparative Perspective
. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998,
326 + xi pp. $45.00 (hbk); $17.00 (pbk).
Charles Epp has written a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the growth of
civil rights, through an examination of the decisions of the high courts of the United
States, Britain, Canada and India. His focus is on the development of new rights that
emerge in judicial interpretation outside of the property and contract realm. However,
despite the focus on the activities of appellate courts in these jurisdictions, this is not
a ‘court-centred’, doctrinal analysis. Rather, the argument is that ‘rights revolutions’,
to the extent that they have occurred in these countries, were the product of deliber-
ate, strategic organising by rights activists. In Epp’s analysis, the creation of a culture
of rights has depended upon the development of a ‘support structure for legal mobil-
ization, consisting of rights-advocacy organizations, rights-advocacy lawyers, and
sources of financing, particularly government-supported financing’ (p. 2). It is this
political economy of appellate litigation which not only supports rights struggles, but
which also channels judicial power towards more egalitarian ends. Support structures
thus do not follow rights revolutions; they precede them.
The book focuses primarily upon the rights of criminal defendants and ‘women’s
rights’, looking at the degree of judicial attention, support and implementation of
rights. Thus, in the American context, we see in the 20th century the turn away from
a legal culture focused on business litigants, towards more egalitarian rights struggles.
This change, Epp argues, was produced in large measure by the development of rights
advocacy organisations (particularly the ACLU), the organisational development and
social diversification of the legal profession, and the emergence of the Civil Rights
Section in the Justice Department. Given how much ink has been spilled discussing
American civil rights, the author does well...

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