Relationships between "causes;' "law;' and "lawyering" are complex. Attorneys who take up particular causes may be inspired by or even participate in broadbased social movements. Their experiences within these movements may produce deep commitments to right social and political wrongs and to make law serve justice. Acting on these commitments may entail representing individual clients, filing class action suits, founding organizations, advocating legislative change, organizing particular constituencies, and negotiating with the officials who interpret and enforce law (Sarat and Scheingold 1998, 2001; Scheingold and Sarat 2004). "Law" and "social movements;' may, however, have different life courses. Cases that grow out of social movement activity may take years to be adjudicated and may be transformed as they move through successive procedural steps (Mather and Yngvesson 1980-81; Garth 1992). As legal actions are pending, political and historical circumstances can change both the "cause" and the social movement out of which these actions grew. At the same time, legal developments-whether successes or setbacks-define issues in particular terms, create new demarcations, establish new rules, and set new processes in motion. As Michael McCann (2004: 510) notes, "legal mobilization politics typically involves reconstructing legal dimensions of inherited social relations:' Law thus has an "embedded" quality-law references prior conditions, dates, and legal language, but law also can redefine agendas, constituencies, and causes. Cause lawyers, in conjunction with social movements, shape (or attempt to shape) the path oflaw, even as such pathmaking can redefine social reality in ways that, in turn, redefine causes and reshape activism.
