"Public Interest Litigation in a Neoliberal Age: Law, Media, and the Politics of Responsibility"

“新自由主义时代的公益诉讼：法律、媒体和责任政治”

• 批准号: 0451207
• 负责人: Michael McCann
• 金额: $ 7.69万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-15 至 2008-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0451207&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Public; Interest; Litigation; Neoliberal; Age

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.

关于自由派公共利益律师的法律动员运动的学术尚未分析或评估诉讼如何实现其宣传问题和塑造公众对这些问题的理解的主要目标。本研究调查了如何在我们的大众媒介政治文化中构建和评估增加企业和政府责任的实质性主张以及通过公共利益诉讼活动推进这些主张的主要倡导者的可信度。 该项目通过实证追踪公共利益团体关于与四个领域相关的健康危害的主张和诉讼来探讨这些问题：硅胶乳房植入物、快餐、肥胖和枪支。 PI将使用传统的框架分析来跟踪每个政策领域的法律动员，从争议者陈述或推断的目标到法律纠纷的新闻报道以及纠纷引发的更广泛问题，再到关注的利益集团、官方政策制定者和大众受众的反应。 这将通过对对手公开陈述的目标进行定性内容分析来实现；对新闻杂志、报纸和通讯社政策问题抽样报道的大型数据集（2500 篇文章）进行定量分析；采访团体领导人和诉讼律师、记者和编辑以及官方政策制定者；并对诉讼的公众舆论和传统政策影响的现有数据进行分析。 研究结果将发表在大学出版社的书籍、学术文章、流行新闻杂志文章和公共网站上。更广泛的影响将包括为研究生和本科生提供重要的研究培训经验，以及对当前有关健康风险的政治产生重要见解，这些见解可能会引起活动家、政策精英和广大公民的极大兴趣。