Social Movements and The Legal Field: Becoming-Constituent

The relationship between social movements and the legal * eld is controversial and complex. This paper begins by recognizing that the concept of social movement does not belong to legal doctrine and then synthetically reconstruct the relevance of it for a legal understanding. In fact, even if this concept is not formally taken into account by constitutions or by legal codes, a socio-legal approach underscores the need for the comprehension and inclusion of collective phenomena into legal theory. First, the pa- per explores the way in which ‘social movement’ has been taken up and translated in the legal * eld through the concept of social change and constitutional change. Second, this research goes through various cases in which social movements use law strate- gically, from the phenomenon of cause lawyering to the litigation strategy. Finally, it stands for a theoretical understanding of the role of social movements in legal theory as a lively expression of ‘becoming-constituent’.