Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here the floodgate model, restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the floodgate model would predict, the groups\u27 history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the floodgate model imagines, both groups\u27 relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups\u27 legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state

Resistance through representation: ‘storylines’, advertising and Police Federation campaigns

The Police Federation has become an active and successful pressure group on policing and criminal justice issues in the U.K. This article traces the origins of the Federation through to two bitter and far reaching campaigns in the post?war period. The first was the Federation's law and order and pay campaign in the 1970s, the second its battle against the Conservative government's reform proposals during 1993. It is argued that these campaigns represented ‘moments of truth’ when the Federation took it case to the public, appealing above the heads of government and senior officers in pursuit of its goals. A notable, and perhaps unique feature of these campaigns is shifting the ‘arena of negotiation’ through the use of press advertisements. The core textual and pictorial images and representations of the police and policework deployed during these campaigns are examined through use of the richly suggestive concept of ‘storylines