Taking Up the Cause to the High Courts. Litigants and Legal Auxiliaries between Politicization and Technicization.

How do individual disputes evolve until they end up, as symbols of a cause, before French high courts? An analysis of several cases in the field of anti-discrimination law and the defense of prisoners’ rights shows how grievances are transformed into original and “interesting” legal issues, and into vectors of broader social transformations. We consider how movements advance their claims along the jurisdictional chain, and how different types of lawyers intervene all along (court lawyers, supreme court lawyers, association employees), besides other activists. Longitudinal study of cases demonstrates how various configurations of actors correspond to variable articulations between politicization and technicalization of cases. The stability of these configurations, particularly in the relationship between lawyers defending the case at different levels, appears to be crucial. On the one hand, it helps to secure a coherent vision of the problem, from a legal as well as from a political perspective. On the other hand, it places individual litigation in a broader time frame, making it part of an iterative and cumulative game in which each decision – apparently positive or negative – can serve as a basis for future strategies, sometimes far beyond the individual claimants first initiative.