Criminal Prosecution and the Legal Control of Protest

Abstract

Criminal prosecutions and trials are normal events in the life cycle of many protest efforts and often have important consequences for the struggle between social movements and their opponents. Even so, social movement and law and society scholars have neglected protest prosecutions and trials since some initial work twenty to thirty years ago. This article discusses the relevance of these legal events for issues in contemporary research and offers several hypotheses for future investigation. More generally, it argues that the study of the social control of social movements will benefit from addressing the criminal proceedings arising from political dissent.