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Over the course of the past 30 years or so,“legal recourse” has become a major subject of political sociology in the United States and, more recently, in France. 1 Within this broad field, the processes of juridification and judicialization2 must first be differentiated. As it operates in a number of different legal systems, the latter is itself a polymorphic phenomenon. 3 In addition, work on judicialization focuses on different actors (practitioners and theoreticians of the law, stakeholders in legal cases, political personnel) and courts of varying nature and scope. In the sociology of mobilisation, the study of “legal action repertoires” 4 has been based on investigations concerning how social causes are publicised and spread, whether this be through the use of cause lawyering5 or the work of victims’ associations.

While drawing on such recent work, this article offers a new perspective: we argue that “legal recourse”, rather than …