| Sumario: | Utilizing case studies of antinuclear power litigation in the 1970s in the U.S., West Germany, France, and Sweden, the writer develops a general theory of political systems and legal activity. The U.S., West Germany, and France all had considerable amounts of antinuclear litigation, but in France and Germany, such litigation was aimed almost solely at the state. The targets of antinuclear litigation were much more dispersed in the U.S. Sweden, which was centralized and had a corporatist political system, had significantly less antinuclear activity than the other three countries, which were roughly comparable. The only country in which the state took an active role in shaping the content of legal cases was Germany, and this was the only country where litigation became a critical factor in modifying national policy. The writer examines how contextual factors such as the political frames of nation-states, which exists apart from individual litigiousness and even apart from legal systems themselves, can create particular cross-cultural variations in patterns of legal activity.
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