Scholarship regarding legal mobilization campaigns by liberal public interest lawyers has yet to analyze or to assess how well litigation achieves its primary goals of publicizing issues and shaping public understandings of those issues. This research investigates how both the substantive claims for increased corporate and governmental responsibility and the credibility of key advocates advancing these claims through public interest litigation campaigns are constructed and assessed in our mass-mediated political culture. The project explores these questions by empirically tracing public interest groups' claims and litigation regarding health hazards related to four areas: silicone breast implants, fast food, obesity, and guns. The PIs will use conventional framing analysis to follow legal mobilization in each policy area from disputants' stated or inferred objectives through news coverage of legal disputes and the broader issues that disputes raise to responses from attentive interest groups, official policy makers, and mass audiences. This will be accomplished through qualitative content analyses of publicly stated goals of adversaries; quantitative analysis of a large data set (2500 articles) sampling coverage of the policy issues in newsmagazines, newspapers, and wire services; interviews with group leaders and litigators, reporters and editors, and official policymakers; and analyses of available data on public opinion and conventional policy impacts of litigation. Findings will be published in a university press book, scholarly articles, popular news magazine articles, and a public website. Broader impacts will include significant research training experiences for graduate and undergraduate students as well as generation of important insights about current politics regarding health risks that are likely to be of great interest to issue activists, policy elites, and citizens generally.
