Résumé (EN)

All social movements have, at one point or another in their development, been confronted with the question of legality. This may come about either because the movement aims to change the law, or because it is itself facing legal repression. In addition, this could reflect that “the state usually acts through law, the state can be constrained by law” (Abel 1998: 69). However, the use of law, and the legal system, as tools of protest is not an easy task, and there are indeed a number of limits to legal strategies of protest. The field of critical legal studies has emphasized that the legal system has an underlying tendency to treat disadvantaged groups less fairly and, above all, that legal decisions are insufficient on their own to bring about changes in the economic and social order (see, for example, Rosenberg 1991). However, this position has been challenged in recent years by a number of pieces of work which have reconsidered the importance of contentious uses of law.