Political justice since seattle: The intersection of the U.S. criminal justice system and global justice activism.

This paper examines the shifting landscape of the intersection of global justice activism and the U.S. criminal justice system since the Seattle n30 WTO protests (30 November 1999). The National Lawyers Guild, drawing on 35 years of observation of First Amendment activity, concludes that post-Seattle protest policing manifests "a noticeable shift from reactive law enforcement to preemptive law enforcement." Global justice activism is operationalized here to include: opposition to the international institutions such as the World Bank and WTO, anti-corporate campaigns associated with the anti-globalization movement, and movements which predate this movement but have become involved with it. The criminal justice system is operationalized here to include relevant laws, policing, investigation, prosecution, defense of activists, and lawsuits fighting back on all these aspects of the law (political litigation). Obviously this is a lot of territory to cover, and this article aims to simply describe the landscape, laying the groundwork for future analyses of each area in the above list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]