French legal term; see also "shiny object"

While reminiscing about an old post, I looked up ol' Abdul Rahman on Wikipedia.  My attention was drawn to the instruction to see also "cause célèbre", a term with which I was previously familiar but that I had not thought about in the context of Shiny Object Theory.  The cause célèbre entry lists many shiny objects of the past, and it is a thought-provoking read.  How (or why) did these cases become important?  Which (or how many) of these cases resulted in meaningful change?  Was it possible, ex ante, to have known which cases would prove to have been worth the attention and which ones would not?  If Shiny Object Theory ever gets anywhere, these are the sorts of questions with which I imagine it will grapple.

By the way, if anyone still wonders whether P-Shock's pet "theory" has relevance, consider this and, of course, this.  It seems clear that significant resentment can be generated simply via observation of the roving attentions of mass-media producers and consumers.  If social scientists could explain why, or at least how, attention shifts (is shifted?), we might be able to mitigate that anger.