Law and society research finds that the effects of rights mobilization are equivocal and varied.

The overall takeaway is perhaps the idea that rights are paradoxical (McCann 2014; Chua 2022). Rights can vindicate and empower the oppressed, but they can also fail to protect them, and even disempower or disillusion those who look to rights for protection.

At the heart of law and society's debate over the efficacy of legal mobiliza­tion is a methodological issue. How a scholar approaches the study of legal mobilization and their consequences is deeply connected to how one con­ceptualizes the power of law. In the classic “rights debate,” based on legal mobilization research informed by the American experience, “myth of rights” proponents argue that rights fail to live up to their promises of vindicating wrongs and preventing rights-offending behavior. Rosenberg (2008), in his well-known study of landmark US Supreme Court decisions, contends that major court verdicts did not bring about social change, not without the intervention of the legislature and administration. Rosenberg's position is based on the instrumental might of rights and explores whether rights can achieve tangible wins, such as damages and the prohibition or compulsion of actions.

ForAsian law and society research, we suggest additional considerations for the downside of legal mobilization. Fieldwork by some scholars demonstrates that rights do not necessarily resonate with local populations. Consequently, NGOs or activists may find that rights lack efficacy if they try to encourage local populations to redress their grievances by making rights claims (see, e.g., Engel 20r2). Others caution that rights mobilization attracts retaliation from the state or other powerful opponents. Or, they conclude that appealing to rights, especially when it involves adaptations to suit local norms, ends up pandering to the status quo and causing a movement or challenger to lose their transformative edge.

On the other side of the classic rights debate, legal mobilization scholars account for the symbolic power of rights, which we discussed in Section I. In this broader view, rights as social practices have not only instrumental value but also the ability to fashion cultural changes - alter the way people under­stand their social interactions, who they are, and their place in society, motivate the marginalized to speak out, bring people together, and inspire collective action. Cultural changes can be imperceptible, taking place quietly person by person, but they can snowball and cumulate bigger consequences for the future. We saw hints of such possibilities in the readings by Chua on pragmatic resistance and Becker on Nepalese women's rights activists.

The differences in law and society research on the effects - both positive and negative - of legal mobilization could be due to the theoretical orienta­tion of the scholar and what appeals to the scholar (for example, is the scholar an optimist who sees a glass of water as half-full or a pessimist who sees the glass as half-empty?), but they are also due to the empirical context, the research design, and the data. Context matters deeply in all law and society research, of course, and definitely so for rights mobilization. In response to criticisms that rights are too moderate and play within existing arrangements of social relations, as Chua (2019) noted on the Burmese LGBT rights move­ment, whether or not rights mobilization is radical depends on the context, in that case, Myanmar: “While it is not radical in the revolutionary sense of toppling regimes or eradicating structures, it challenges deeply rooted beliefs and the social hierarchy and organization of relations founded on them” (142).

The following four readings illustrate the divergent effects of legal mobiliza­tion and engage with the paradox of rights to varying degrees. We start with readings that present critical views and move toward those that project more sanguine outlooks.

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