How the right against rights deploys legal mobilization

Legal mobilization scholarship has emphasized the translation of marginalized actors’ aspirations and grievances into rights claims and legal demands across institutional and non-institutional arenas (Jaramillo Reference Jaramillo2025; McCann Reference McCann1994; Vanhala Reference Vanhala2011). It has also theorized the strategic and intentional deployment of legal rules, procedures, and institutions to pursue public-oriented change, including by actors who are not structurally marginalized (Lehoucq and Taylor Reference Lehoucq and Taylor2020; Zemans Reference Zemans1983). Building on these approaches, we define right-wing legal mobilization (RWLM) as the intentional use of legal rules, procedures, institutions, or legal professional authority to undermine, block, or roll back the rights of marginalized groups. It does so by shaping policy, institutional arrangements, and the distribution of rights and obligations in ways that preserve existing hierarchies and traditional privileges (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Pereira and Escoffier2026).

Right against rights actors deploy RWLM through multiple organizational forms, including civil society organizations, lawyers’ networks, political parties, religious institutions, and business and professional associations (Heinz et al. Reference Heinz, Paik and Southworth2003; Hoover and den Dulk Reference Hoover and den Dulk2004; Teles Reference Teles2008). In the field of sexual and reproductive rights, conservative legal mobilization has been shaped by “NGO-ization,” which professionalizes legal engagement, and supplies legitimacy and organizational stability (Vaggione Reference Vaggione, Bergallo, Sierra and Vaggione2018).

RWLM strategies can be grouped into participation in other actors’ judicial cases as third parties and litigating cases designed to shift doctrine, interpretation, and implementation (Southworth Reference Southworth2008; Vanhala Reference Vanhala2011). A core participatory tactic is the amicus curiae brief, which has been a prominent mode of conservative participation and has grown in prevalence in US Supreme Court litigation since the 1970s (Hoover and den Dulk Reference Hoover and den Dulk2004; O’Connor and Epstein Reference O’Connor and Epstein1983). Such participation often involves organizational coalitions and transnational projection, including the submission of briefs by US conservative organizations in foreign constitutional courts (Southworth Reference Southworth2024).

When litigating their own cases, conservative litigants seek to roll back constitutional doctrines, impede the exercise or regulation of rights, create chilling effects on rights practice, and revitalize counter-rights as affirmative claims (Beltrán et al. Reference Beltrán, Puga and Bohórquez Monsalve2022). In Colombia, anti-abortion actors have pursued nullification strategies that invoke procedural claims such as due process violations to contest prior rights-expanding decisions (Beltrán et al. Reference Beltrán, Puga and Bohórquez Monsalve2022; Lehoucq Reference Lehoucq2020). In Argentina, conservative litigation has targeted administrative protocols for rights implementation, and precautionary measures have been used to obstruct access to legal abortion for extended periods (Balaguer et al. Reference Balaguer, Luz Baretta and Belén Copetti2022; Ruibal Reference Ruibal2018). In the climate domain, conservative legal tactics have included open-records strategies that can manufacture doubt and hinder scientific work by increasing individual and organizational risk (Ley Reference Ley2018; Lin and Peel Reference Lin and Peel2024). Right against rights actors also engage in “forum-shopping,” selecting venues expected to be receptive to their arguments, including lower courts and specialized international fora (Peñas Defago and Morán Faúndes Reference Peñas Defago and Manuel Morán Faúndes2014).

Conservative lawyers also engage in “extrajudicial participation” to influence their own or others’ litigation processes. They circulate legal analyses and materials aimed at shaping how litigants, judges, and allied publics interpret ongoing and future cases (Briffault Reference Briffault2024; Southworth Reference Southworth2008). For example, in Latin America, transnational Catholic institutions and religious academic organizations supply the doctrinal resources that sustain RWLM (Beltrán et al. Reference Beltrán, Puga and Bohórquez Monsalve2022).

Outcomes are not limited to wins and losses in court, because even unsuccessful litigation can produce “radiating effects” that reshape agendas, organizational resources, and the broader terrain of contention (Briffault Reference Briffault2024; Keck Reference Keck2009). One radiating effect is agenda-seizing, in which litigation re-opens issues that may have appeared settled, enabling the diffusion of counter-doctrines into legislative and public arenas (Keck Reference Keck2009). Another radiating effect is the production of confusion and uncertainty through procedural contestation and technical reframing, which can raise the practical costs of claiming rights even when formal doctrine remains intact (Balaguer et al. Reference Balaguer, Luz Baretta and Belén Copetti2022; Ley Reference Ley2018). Litigation can also raise the profile of litigants and lawyers, support fundraising, and create pathways into state institutions that subsequently shape the receptivity of legal and administrative fields to future RWLM (Briffault Reference Briffault2024). Finally, even when conservative claims fail, repeated litigation can intensify polarization and encourage anti-institutionalism by representing rights conflicts as irreconcilable and courts as biased toward particular rights regimes (Cumper and Lewis Reference Cumper and Lewis2019).

The literature on right-wing legal mobilization

In the past decades, academic studies on RWLM document a transition from emerging domestic networks to a sophisticated, transnational movement (de Búrca And Young Reference Búrca and Young2023; Gianella Malca Reference Gianella Malca, Bergallo, Sierra and Vaggione2018; Peele Reference Peele1984; Stefancic and Delgado Reference Stefancic and Delgado1996; Teles Reference Teles2008). Despite its growth and increasing power, the scholarly literature on legal mobilization, has disproportionately addressed progressive collective action (McCann Reference McCann1994; Vanhala Reference Vanhala2011, Reference Vanhala2022; Woodward Reference Woodward2015; McCammon et al. Reference McCammon, Moon, Hearne and Robinson2020; Ruibal Reference Ruibal2018; De Silva and Plagis Reference Silva and Plagis2023; van der Vet and Sundstrom Reference Vet and Sundstrom2023; Biland and Hersant Reference Biland and Hersant2025). Cause lawyering, for instance, focuses mainly on legal claims by NGOs, social movements, and victims’ groups that represent the rights of marginalized people (Haddad and Sundstrom Reference Haddad and Sundstrom2023; Hajjar Reference Hajjar1997; Marshall and Hale Reference Marshall and Hale2014; Meili Reference Meili2022; Sarat and Scheingold Reference Sarat and Scheingold1998, Reference Sarat and Scheingold2006). Also, the literature on human rights assumes an evolutionary expansion of rights (Pinker Reference Pinker2011; Sikkink Reference Sikkink2018). Insufficient attention has been paid to the success of RWLM in reshaping rights and legal institutions.

Early scholarship on RWLM saw it as a strategic reaction to liberal advances in civil rights and social policy. Research focused on the rise of the “New Right” and the “Christian Right” in the United States during the 1970s (Conover Reference Conover1983; Peele Reference Peele1984). In this period, conservative groups transitioned from publicity-oriented tactics to professional legal mobilization. Studies paid attention to the increasing use of strategic litigation, the growth of conservative think tanks, and the increasing involvement of conservative lawyers and interest groups in shaping constitutional and social policy (O’Connor and Epstein Reference O’Connor and Epstein1983; Stefancic and Delgado Reference Stefancic and Delgado1996). Research highlights the pivotal role of think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, in formulating policy and shaping legal discourse (Peschek Reference Peschek1989; Stoesz Reference Stoesz1988). While the movement faced internal ideological divisions, elite networks and mediator lawyers bridged gaps between business and religious factions. These actors framed litigation as a defense of traditional values and religious freedoms, and against what they conceived as “special rights” (Dudas Reference Dudas2005; Super Reference Super2004). Research has also examined the right against right’s strategic use of amicus curiae briefs in those years to influence the Burger Court and boost its adaptation to judicial policymaking (Ivers and O’Connor Reference Ivers and O’Connor1987; O’Connor and Epstein Reference O’Connor and Epstein1983; Whittington Reference Whittington and Tomlins2005). These years are portrayed as a foundational stage that allowed right against rights legal actors to build the needed organizational platforms for a sophisticated, institutionally embedded conservative counter-revolution.

In the coming decades, the literature on RWLM has addressed the buildup of an increasingly diverse, professionalized and institutionalized movement in the US and Europe (Hollis-Brusky Reference Hollis-Brusky2015; Teles Reference Teles2008). The Federalist Society provides an example of a dominant epistemic community in the US (Avery and McLaughlin Reference Avery and McLaughlin2013; Salamone Reference Salamone2014). This network supplied intellectual capital and coordinated influence over judicial appointments (Hollis-Brusky Reference Hollis-Brusky2015). Researchers also distinguished conservative funding models from progressive ones. Conservative organizations relied heavily on private foundations and individual donors rather than government grants (Albiston and Nielsen Reference Albiston and Nielsen2014). This financial autonomy allowed for greater strategic flexibility in litigation and lobbying (Paik et al. Reference Paik, Heinz and Southworth2011; Somin Reference Somin2009).

Academic work further documented the strategic appropriation of rights discourse. Conservative actors reframed concepts like religious freedom and parental rights to resist progressive social changes (Mello Reference Mello2015; NeJaime Reference NeJaime2009; Tagliarina Reference Tagliarina2012; Vaggione Reference Vaggione, Bergallo, Sierra and Vaggione2018). These efforts particularly targeted LGBT + and reproductive rights. This period also saw the expansion of research beyond the United States. Research documented active transnational engagement by conservative legal actors, especially faith-based NGOs and advocacy networks that emulate liberal transnational strategies (Bob Reference Bob2012; McCrudden Reference McCrudden2015). Studies concurrently documented legal counter-mobilization in Latin America. These studies provided key analytical tools for understanding RWLM focused on efforts against abortion and contraception through the selective use of international human rights discourse in countries like Brazil, Chile and Argentina (De Assis Machado Reference De Assis Machado2023; Morgan Reference Morgan2014; Muñoz León Reference Muñoz León2014; Ruibal Reference Ruibal2015).

The most recent research on RWLM has paid attention to cause lawyering and its organizational capabilities (Kocemba and Stambulski Reference Kocemba and Stambulski2024; Southworth Reference Southworth2024, Reference Southworth2025). Southworth (Reference Southworth2024), for instance, addresses how US-based conservative advocacy organizations and their European affiliates engage in legal mobilization to resist European integration and liberal social projects. In the past few years, research has also examined litigation tactics, ranging from constitutional challenges, strategic use of amicus curiae briefs, to administrative and legislative advocacy (Blokker Reference Blokker2024; Hollis-Brusky and Wilson Reference Hollis-Brusky and Wilson2020; Konet et al. Reference Konet, McCammon and Torrence2024). Conservative ideological frameworks have been studied as tools to frame legal mobilization through traditional values, the sanctity of life, religious morality, and opposition to liberal rights expansions (Cliquennois et al. Reference Cliquennois, Chaptel and Champetier2024; Sanders and Jenkins Reference Sanders and Jenkins2022). Additionally, research has documented the expansion of RWLM into new domains, like climate denialism (Ley Reference Ley2018).

Finally, the outlook by which this type of legal mobilization is studied is starting to look at its transnational and global components. How conservative legal activism reaches international organizations, such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Organizations of American States, is a matter under recent study (Blokker Reference Blokker2024; Mos Reference Mos2025; Peñas Defago Reference Peñas Defago2025). Haldane (Reference Haldane2025) and de Búrca and Young (Reference Búrca and Young2023) also document the networks and transnational diffusion of anti-gender mobilization around rights.

Despite this growing scholarship, significant gaps remain in understanding the origins, types, actors, tactics, and outcomes of RWLM. Additionally, most studies are concentrated in the US and Europe, with an emerging field in Latin America pointing to broader dynamics still underexplored elsewhere. The articles in this Special Issue represent an important step toward filling those gaps. They significantly advance the conceptualization of right-wing legal mobilization by demonstrating that regressive actors do not merely reject liberal democratic institutions but rather strategically weaponize their procedural, discursive, and institutional frameworks to curtail the rights of marginalized groups. Together, the articles contend that RWLM should not be understood as mere “backlash,” but as an enduring, strategic effort in which politically, economically, and culturally advantaged actors deploy law to stabilize, recalibrate, and extend unequal allocations of rights and entitlements. To do so, they expand the analytical focus beyond traditional litigation to include constitutional replacement processes (Rodríguez et al. Reference Rodríguez, Donoso and Somma2026, this issue), the internal “backdoor” of state administrative agencies (Saffon and Benitez Reference Saffon and Benitez2026, this issue), the duality of democracy (Barker and Switzer Reference Barker and Switzer2026, this issue), and non-institutional legal advocacy (Khalil Reference Khalil2026, this issue). The contributors therefore reveal a sophisticated repertoire of tactics that allow right-against-rights networks to normalize the retraction of progressive achievements through the law and its institutions.

Overview of articles in this special issue

The articles in this Special Issue explain how conservative and far-right actors use the language of rights, legality, and democracy to justify limits on gender, sexual, religious, and migrant rights. At the same time, these actors present themselves as defenders of children, the family, the nation, or popular will. The authors identify similar tactics across very different settings, namely North African courts, Swedish debates over Qur’an burnings, Chile’s constitutional process, and quiet work inside state agencies. They include strategic secular arguments, selective use of rights claims, repressive and pseudo-legal tools, and repeated legal decisions that slowly erode protections for disadvantaged groups.

Heba Khalil’s article offers a detailed empirical and theoretical illustration of RWLM. It examines how conservative lawyers in Egypt and Tunisia mobilize the law to attack gender and sexuality rights in contexts of illiberal legality. The paper addresses four legal cases: the TikTok “influencers” prosecutions, the Rainbow Flag arrests, the legal challenge to interfaith marriage reforms, and the lawsuit against the LGBT + rights NGO Shams. Drawing on those emblematic cases, the paper combines legal case analysis, sixteen interviews, and court ethnography to trace conservative legal action against sexual and gender minority rights. Khalil argues that, rather than explicitly rejecting rights and legality, conservative lawyers appropriate them as key sources of legitimacy for anti-rights projects. She identifies three recurrent tactics. Rights selectivism uses some rights claims, such as children’s or family rights, to justify curtailing others, including sexual and reproductive rights. Repressive legalism deploys tangential legal provisions to criminalize queer expression and feminist advocacy, such as cybercrime laws, anti-prostitution statutes, or colonial-era penal codes. Majoritarianism frames these legal campaigns as expressions of popular will, democracy, and anti-colonial sovereignty, thereby casting minority rights as elitist or foreign impositions. Across the cases, conservative legal actors succeed in shaping public debate, provoking institutional crackdowns, and deepening stigma, even when they do not always win in court. Khalil’s theorization highlights how legal opportunities and threats are constructed and demonstrates how apparently “ordinary” legal action by private lawyers can activate powerful state resources against marginalized groups.

Barker and Switzer analyze RWLM in Sweden, a country often seen as a social-democratic, rights-protecting “moral superpower.” They argue that a coalition of far-right and conservative actors exploits the “duality of democracy,” which they theorize as democracy’s paradoxical commitment to universal rights and to bounded, ethnonational membership. Using a qualitative case-study design, the article examines police permits and court decisions around Qur’an desecrations, constitutional provisions on fundamental freedoms, party programs, government speeches, and the Tidö Agreement’s migration and citizenship proposals. It shows how actors such as provocateur Rasmus Paludan, the Sweden Democrats, and government partners frame Qur’an burnings as the exercise of core democratic rights to expression and assembly, while casting Muslims and “multiculturalism” as threats to Swedish democracy. The article then traces how this framing underpins restrictive migration and citizenship reforms that tie basic protections to “Swedish values,” “good character,” and integration benchmarks, and expand grounds for migrants’ expulsion and potential denaturalization. As a result, rights become earned, revocable privileges rather than inherent entitlements. The authors conclude that Swedish RWLM does not reject liberal-democratic ideals; instead, it weaponizes constitutional freedoms and progressive credentials (including some women’s and LGBT + rights) to normalize the retrenchment of religious and migrant rights and to progressively bend, rather than break, liberal democracy.

Rodríguez et al.’s article analyzes the mobilization of anti-abortion groups during Chile’s constitutional replacement process. This study focuses on how the “right against rights” engages the specific arena of constitution-making to resist advances in gender rights. Anti-abortion actors faced an initially unfavorable political context, marked by prior judicial defeats, shifting public opinion, and a progressive Constitutional Convention dominated by feminist delegates who successfully secured a pro-abortion provision in the draft constitution. The authors identify this activity as constitutional mobilization, a distinct form of legal mobilization focused on shaping foundational constitutional design rather than mere legislative or litigation strategy. Anti-rights actors developed three core strategies to overcome their minority position inside the Convention. First, they employed strategic secularism, grounding their opposition in constitutional law, natural law theory, and international human rights discourse, arguing that life and dignity begin at conception. Second, they engaged in strategic bundling, connecting anti-abortion claims to broader conservative issues, such as the defense of private property, national identity, and the rejection of plurinationalism. Third, following their defeat within the Constitutional Convention, they successfully leveraged the subsequent 2022 constitutional referendum campaign (Rechazo). During this external mobilization, anti-abortion forces framed the entire draft as a systemic threat, ultimately contributing to the defeat of the constitutional proposal and preventing the constitutionalization of abortion rights. Through their analysis, Rodríguez et al. demonstrate that RWLM operates as an institutional reconfiguration project, not merely as reactive backlash.

The paper by Saffon and Benitez proposes a conceptual apparatus for analyzing what they call the backlash against rights. Backlash is defined as an extraordinary reaction to a progressive institutional development in rights protection. This reaction seeks to reverse or curtail the policy by challenging or subverting the rules or authority of the responsible agencies. This goal makes backlash distinct from ordinary legal countermobilization, or pushback, which uses established legal channels. A key novelty in Saffon and Benitez’ analysis is the notion of veiled backlash, which occurs in the “backdoor of state agencies.” It involves regressive networks gaining dominant influence within state institutions. Operating beyond public scrutiny, veiled backlash seeks to undermine pro-rights advancements while subverting institutional objectives. It relies on pseudo-legal tactics. These tactics either disguise illegal actions as legal or involve discrete non-compliance that formally respects the law but violates its spirit. Veiled backlash is frequently cumulative. It achieves ambitious regressive goals through frequent, seemingly ordinary tactics. The authors emphasize that veiled backlash has a high likelihood of success because it is difficult to detect and challenge. By identifying intentional institutional sabotage, their theorization provides necessary precision regarding how powerful actors engage in rights rollback.