New from Stanford University Press:
The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, by Joshua C. Wilson (University of Denver). The Press explains:
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade
stands as a historic victory for abortion-rights activists. But rather
than serving as the coda to what had been a comparatively low-profile
social conflict, the decision mobilized a wave of anti-abortion protests
and ignited a heated struggle that continues to this day.
Picking up the story in the contentious decades that followed Roe,
The Street Politics of Abortion is the first book to consider the rise
and fall of clinic-front protests through the 1980s and 1990s, the most
visible and contentious period in U.S. reproductive politics. Joshua
Wilson considers how street level protests lead to three seminal Court
decisions—Planned Parenthood v. Williams, Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y., and Hill v. Colorado.
The eventual demise of street protests via these cases taught
anti-abortion activists the value of incremental institutional
strategies that could produce concrete policy gains without drawing the
public's attention. Activists on both sides ultimately moved—often
literally—from the streets to fight in state legislative halls and
courtrooms.
At its core, the story of clinic-front protests is
the story of the Christian Right's mercurial assent as a force in
American politics. As the conflict moved from the street, to the courts,
and eventually to legislative halls, the competing sides came to rely
on a network of lawyers and professionals to champion their causes. New
Christian Right institutions—including Pat Robertson's American Center
for Law and Justice and the Regent University Law School, and Jerry
Falwell's Liberty University School of Law—trained elite activists for
their "front line" battles in government. Wilson demonstrates how the
abortion-rights movement, despite its initial success with Roe,
has since faced continuous challenges and difficulties, while the
anti-abortion movement continues to gain strength in spite of its
losses.
A few blurbs:
"Beautifully written and tremendously accessible, The Street Politics of Abortion offers new insight into how lawyers—especially those assigned to cases
rather than taking them as part of their political
commitments—understand their role as trial lawyers and social movement
actors. This excellent book is analytically important, methodologically
innovative, and breaks new ground in the study of social movements,
legal consciousness, and the first amendment."—Laura Beth Nielsen
"On
about as hot a subject as a scholar can take on, Joshua Wilson has
sensitively and exhaustively shown how activists' 'stories' about the
law shape the everyday politics of abortion. Blending political science
and sociology, this is modern legal scholarship at its very
best."—Steven Teles
The TOC and an excerpt from Chapter 1 are available
here.
