Resource: Stealth Advocacy Can (Sometimes) Change the World

By: Margo Schlanger

January 1, 2015

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this Review addresses the parenting-equality case study. I summarize Gash’s account and add to it the cautionary tale of the 2002 failure of stealth parenting-equality advocacy in Michigan. Part II addresses, more briefly, Gash’s group-home study. In Part III, I put Gash’s theoretical contribution into context. Her important and original contribution is her claim that civil rights litigation can succeed quietly, not just loudly. In evaluating this claim, I suggest that she might usefully have addressed the issue of whether stealth advocacy is really a subset of a broader category of efforts to first alter social facts on the ground, and then play defense to preserve that alteration.

https://michiganlawreview.org/stealth-advocacy/