Shaping Financial Decisions at the Local Level Through Social Uses of Law ?

I offer to analyse the social uses of law (legal norms) devised through discourses and practices of “debt auditor-citizens”, as a contribution in the legal mobilization theories’ realm (McCann, 2004). The citizen debt audit can be defined as an activist project, that was born around 2011 in several European local contexts, in order to question the law-making processes of financial decisions, just as the content of these decisions. It consists, for social actors, in appropriating public counts, studying and interpreting them so as to produce critics and prescriptions from citizens’ point of view. Legal mobilization is precisely one pillar of such social experiments’ repertoire of collective action. By comparing four groups of local debt citizen audit from Spain (targeting the regions of Madrid and Catalonia), Belgium (the town of Liège) and France (Grenoble metropole), my paper develops a panorama of all social uses of law that were made to contest local financial decisions. My contribution remains original insofar for two reasons: first, the dynamics through which finances are contested through legal mobilization is not so invested in academic fields. Therefore, it pays particular attention on “cases”, revealing legal mobilization against power (Abel, 1998), against public actors in order to claim more public agency (even if it could be perceived as paradoxical). The aim of the paper is twofold : it contributes to seize structural dynamics in how social groups coming from different “political cultures” (Céfaï, 2001) shape various sources of law to promote similar social interests (demands for more state and public regulation, more public funds, efficient spending of public funds). Meanwhile, it emphasizes on the fact each group implements its own legal mobilization’ strategies that differ from each other, inasmuch as they take form in unalike political, administrative and institutional contexts. Through a qualitative analysis method (studying the content of both semi-structured interviews’ and documents produced by the six groups), I suggest to split my contribution in two parts. The first part focus on legal socialization, that is to say how social actors gain an understanding of various systems of law, and how they get skills from them. To that extent, I analyse the inventory I made of prosopographic data from debt auditor-citizens, and detail some significant profiles of individuals, embodying legal activists who are not cause lawyers (Sarat, Scheingold, 1998 & 2006). Such activists play a role in the elaboration of legal mobilizations discursive forms that, sometimes, circulate from one group to another (beyond national borders). Afterwards, the second part concentrates on legal mobilizations themselves. The exhibition, through comparative tables, of legal sources quoted by the actors, in order to analyse how law are used as a political and social tool (Sarat, Scheingold, 2006). The paper’s conclusion concisely insists on the consequences of legal mobilization on local politics, since the different groups I study did not follow the same paths of further collective action (litigation, abeyance structure…)