Legal mobilisation, broadly conceived as the use of the legal and judicial system as an instrument of social and political change, has been in­creasingly deployed as a repertoire of collective action in the field of pro-migrant solidarity across the globe, and in the European Union in particular. Scholars have been focusing on a number of cases, initiatives and jurisdictions. Existing research, however, has seldom considered the peculiar case of legal mobilisation around migration in the borderlands, in spite of its flourishing empirical relevance. In this presentation, Frederico Alagna aims to propose a research agenda by explaining what is unique about the use of the law in the contentious politics of migration in border areas and, therefore, why and how it can be studied. To do so, firstly he will review the existing literature on legal mobilisation around migration. Secondly, he will critically discuss the peculiarity of borderlands as sites of legal mobilisation vis-à-vis other forms of collective action, engaging in a dialogue between socio-legal, border and contentious politics studies. Thirdly, he will propose several research avenues that can help us understand, conceptualise and study how this phenomenon unfolds in the EU borderlands.