The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is a civil society organization that was created in 1985 to advance women's substantive equality. Political science scholarship in the early 2000s focused significant attention on LEAF—unanimously characterizing the organization as among the most successful groups involved in legal mobilization in the post-Charter era. However, we know very little about the organization's advocacy outside of the courts. To address this limitation, we provide an analysis of all the advocacy-related activities undertaken by LEAF between 1985 and 2022. The findings illustrate that beginning approximately in 2006, LEAF diversified its “collective action repertoire” to undertake more political mobilization, while also dedicating greater attention to issue areas such as Indigenous rights. Our study challenges the judicial-centric approach adopted in previous studies of LEAF and underscores the importance of studying advocacy through a longitudinal lens and with approaches that account for the dynamism of civil society.
