Shifting Legal Visions

What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors. Judicial actors discarded long-standing positivist legal criteria, historically protective of conservative interests, and embraced doctrines grounded in international human rights law, which made possible innovative readings of constitutions and criminal codes. Litigants were responsible for this shift in legal visions by activating informal mechanisms of ideational change and providing the skills necessary to deal with complex and unusual cases. Through an in-depth exploration of the interactions between judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers in three countries, the book asks how changing ideas about the law and standards of adjudication condition the exercise of judicial power.

In-depth study of processes of judicial transformation that enabled the success of human rights trials in Latin America.

This collection of studies explores recent research in the area of gender and language use experienced around the world. Featuring an interdisciplinary and global approach, the contributors demonstrate how focus on gender and language creates the lived experience. The studies in this book use gender and language to analyze a broad range of topics including religion, politics, education and sexuality. Contributions include the use of language of a new female bishop in Canada, hetronormativity in language use in Croatia, women's magazines in Japan, and the electoral code in Cameroon. Using critical/feminist discourse analysis, the chapters represent scholarship from Britain, Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. Readers in applied linguistics, sociology, women’s studies and education who are interested in language and its power in creating the lived experience will find this book full of intriguing and illuminating connections.

After the fall of military and communist dictatorships at the end of the 1980s, Latin American and Eastern European countries had to reckon with atrocities perpetrated by these Cold War regimes. Judges, prosecutors, and human rights campaigners across the two regions constructed novel readings of international criminal law to fight impunity and realize justice for gross human rights violations. Justice and Memory after Dictatorship: Latin America, Central Eastern Europe and the Fragmentation of International Criminal Law provides a groundbreaking socio-historical account of the global transformation of international criminal law from these two semi-peripheries of the world system. Based on ethnographic observation and analyses of jurisprudence, Raluca Grosescu dissects the narratives that were fundamentally shaped by the relationship of law and politics. Using paradigmatic cases and personal interviews with lawyers and judicial officials from Latin America and Eastern Europe, Grosescu uncovers how legal actors and organizations were instrumental in questioning an international order that marginalized the political violence that had unfolded in the two regions during the Cold War. Justice and Memory after Dictatorship is a significant volume in modern international criminal and human rights law and an important read for scholars, students, and legal practitioners alike.

This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.

Law's Wars is the first comprehensive account of efforts to resist and correct rule of law violations in the US 'war on terror'.

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars to explore issues on the cutting edge of socio-legal research.

Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination - capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy - to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.

Legal and social movement scholars have long puzzled over the role of movements in moving, being moved by, and changing the meanings of the law. But for decades, these two strands of scholarship only dovetailed at their edges, in the work of a few far-seeing scholars. The fields began to more productively merge before and after the turn of the century. In this Element, the authors take an interactive approach to this problem and sketch four mechanisms that seem promising in effecting a true fusion: legal mobilization, legal-political opportunity structure, social construction, and movement-countermovement interaction. The Element also illustrates the workings and interactions of these four mechanisms from two examples of the authors' work: the campaign for same-sex marriage in the United States and social constitutionalism in South Africa.

Examines how intermediaries work on rule of law assistance in authoritarian Myanmar, based on interviews with 100 individuals.