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Bibliographic Citation
Alexandra Huneeus, Javier A Couso & Rachel Sieder, Introduction, in Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America (Javier Couso, Rachel Sieder & Alexandra Huneeus, eds., 2010).
Abstract
Legal practices and ideas about law are undergoing dramatic change in Latin America. Today, a turn-of-the-century crop of constitutions grants higher courts greater powers; provides long lists of social, economic, and cultural rights; and assigns international treaties constitutional status "or better" within the hierarchy of laws. High courts, in turn, have begun to cast themselves as defenders of rights and to intervene in significant political controversies. And, correspondingly, political claims more often take legal forms. The growing importance of law, legal discourse and legal institutions in the political arena has led scholars to report that a "judicialization of politics" is underway in the region. Our volume explores this landscape of changing legal cultures. Starting with the assumption that formalism is no longer a useful concept for describing Latin American legal cultures "and was in any case always an oversimplification" we explore the repertoires of legal ideas and practices that accompany, cause, and are a consequence of the judicialization of politics.
