Comparative Sources of Judicial Empowerment

Woods, Patricia J.; Hilbink, Lisa

doi:10.1177/1065912909350565

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…An explanation that emphasises the influence of programmatic beliefs on institutional change fills some of these gaps (e.g. Woods and Hilbink, 2009). From this perspective, the likelihood of reform increases when actors with principled commitments to legal equality dominate institution-making processes.…”

Section: The Legal Complex and Institutional Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Access to Justice and the Legal Complex: Building a Public Defenders’ Office in Brazil

Nunes

2020

Journal of Politics in Latin America

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Latin American democracies have developed institutions to empower citizens against the state. This article brings attention to an often overlooked, but key, actor in these processes: the legal complex. I argue that the content of reforms designed to strengthen the rule of law partially reflects the interests of politically influential collective legal actors. Political influence is defined as a function of alliances with civil society and embeddedness within decision-making arenas of the state. To develop this argument, the article analyses the slow building of Brazil’s Public Defenders’ Office (PDO). I argue that the office’s initial institutional weakness resulted from defenders’ fragile political position relative to that of prosecutors and the bar during Brazil’s constitutional transition. Its eventual strengthening sixteen years later resulted from changes to the legal complex alliance in its favour, the formation of connections between defenders and civil society, and increased PDO access to policymaking spaces.

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Section: The Legal Complex and Institutional Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Access to Justice and the Legal Complex: Building a Public Defenders’ Office in Brazil

Nunes

2020

Journal of Politics in Latin America

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“…Socio-legal studies of judicial power have shed light on the relative strength of courts across regions and regime types. 2 But socioeconomic 2 Classic studies of judicial review in the United States (Bickel 1962;Casper 1976;Dahl 1957;Rosenberg 2008) have spurred comparative research on courts in East Asia (Ginsburg 2003), Europe (Cichowski 2007), sub-Saharan Africa (Ellet 2013), and Latin America (Helmke and Rios-Figueroa 2011; see also Woods and Hilbink 2009). Recent work has similarly called attention to the functions of courts in authoritarian states (Cheesman 2011;Ghias 2010;Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008;Massoud 2013;Moustafa 2007;Stern 2013).…”

Section: Locating Law In Humanitarian Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work Rules: How International NGOs Build Law in War-Torn Societies

Massoud¹

2015

Law Soc Rev

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Drawing on socio‐legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules‐based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war‐torn societies.

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“…14 Separately, Woods and Hilbink, along with Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, also draw attention to ideologically tinged visions of constitutionalism, contrasting a new progressive, left-leaning neoconstitutionalism against a conservative, right-leaning, neoliberal constitutionalism. 15 Concrete empirical implications flow from theoretical propositions based on principled ideological commitments. First, there should be actors framing reform projects as part of broader projects of either democracy promotion or market promotion.…”

Section: Ideas and Their Observable Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crafting Courts in New Democracies: Ideology and Judicial Council Reforms in Three Mexican States

Ingram¹

2012

Comp Politics

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Judicial strength and the rule of law are increasingly understood as vital to democratic development. Understanding the sources of strong courts, therefore, is critical, and a growing literature examines the political origins of effective judiciaries. 1 A dominant theoretical strand in this research anticipates that judicial reform is a product of rising electoral competition. That is, electoral uncertainty generates the motivations-conceptualized as material, rational-strategic incentives-required to build stronger judicial institutions. Accounts based on electoral uncertainty, however, raise unresolved puzzles of causation and prediction. Despite a broad consensus regarding the benefits of competitive politics, 2 rival causal logics underpin the effects of competition. Moreover, the incentives generated by electoral uncertainty apply to all politicians equally, thus anticipating that better institutions depend less on the ideas or identity of any given politician and arise automatically, as a quasi-mechanical side effect of competition. Further, dysfunctional institutions persist even in competitive settings; reforms frequently occur long after the start of electoral openings; and the specific content of reforms varies across similarly competitive settings, showing electoral accounts to be overly optimistic, or at least ambiguous, about their predictions regarding both the timing and content of reforms. Introducing additional complications, a core insight of a strategic bargaining account of reform anticipates that competition in previously noncompetitive settings, for example Mexico, increases the number of relevant actors, hindering policy change and inhibiting reform. 3 That is, competition might produce less reform, not more. Indeed, a motivated actor in a noncompetitive setting may have the easiest task of effectuating reform, a task that becomes more difficult as competition increases and power fragments. Electoral accounts do not anticipate this negative effect, and tell us nothing of the underlying motivations of such actors. In sum, current theories of judicial change are inconsistent and inconclusive, suffering from problems of both behavioral equivalence and indeterminacy. Rival hypotheses are in play, obfuscating causation and making predictions unclear, unstable, and even contradictory.

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Comparative Sources of Judicial Empowerment

Cited by 27 publications

References 29 publications

Access to Justice and the Legal Complex: Building a Public Defenders’ Office in Brazil

Access to Justice and the Legal Complex: Building a Public Defenders’ Office in Brazil

Work Rules: How International NGOs Build Law in War-Torn Societies

Crafting Courts in New Democracies: Ideology and Judicial Council Reforms in Three Mexican States

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