| This dissertation is intended as a discursive, empirical and theoretical analysis of a social campaign that has mobilized citizen and social groups from Quebec against a specific practice of legal intimidation targeting politically active citizens. It looks at the social constitution of a socio-legal problematic and at the translation of this problematic into a social, political and legal issue that has captured the attention of activists, media, lawyers and policy-makers for more than three years. Central to the elaboration of this problematic was the concept of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). As such, this dissertation discusses the concept of strategic lawsuit against public participation, addresses the conceptual difficulties inherent to the notion, synthesizes the various social, political and psychological issues associated with SLAPP suits, and offers a review of the rights and freedoms threatened by this practice of legal intimidation. It further addresses the processes by which politically active citizens are bullied out of a public sphere of political debate and confined into a legal arena of private action.;This dissertation draws extensively on social movement literature and conceptualizes social protest as communicative and cognitive phenomena. It further addresses issues of legal mobilization, rights and legal consciousness, rights discourse, and legal strategies. It aims at theorizing and understanding the processes by which the legal system is instrumentalized politically- both by and against activists- in order to generate or block social change, to alter power relations and to defend specific positions and interests. As such, it addresses the issue of juridification of politics in Quebec and Canada and questions the processes by which social and political controversies are displaced from what is generally conceived as public spaces of relative openness and transparency -- the media, city halls, schools, parliaments, to name a few -- and confined to the more opaque and narrow institution of the courtroom. |
