Movement of the Landless (MST) and Modalities of Legal Change in Brazil (original) (raw)
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Movement of the Landless (MST) and Juridical Modalities of Legal Change in Brazil
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What juridical modalities of legal change can social movements set in motion to diminish systemic and durable forms of social exclusion? And when are movements successful at doing so? This chapter explores these two questions in the context of the struggle for land waged by the Movement of the Landless'(MST) in Brazil, a country which has one of the most unequal land distributions in the world. It focuses in particular on the movement's emergent juridical strategy and that strategy's contribution to legal change.
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2009
http://scholar.sun.ac.za operated as an '… effective tool[ ] in challenging poverty'. More recently, Sandra Liebenberg has explored to what extent socioeconomic rights case law has promoted other broad transformative goals, such as human dignity and social inclusion. 5 In the same vein Pierre de Vos, writing about the Constitutional Court's first two socioeconomic rights judgments, has explained and attempted to justify some of the more puzzling aspects of these cases as contributing to the broad transformative goal of achieving a substantively equal society. 6 I distinguish my focus from the different accounts related above in two ways. First, my own analysis proceeds, I believe, from an understanding of transformation that differs importantly from the understanding of transformation informing other accounts of the transformative performance of courts in socioeconomic rights cases; and second, I focus on an aspect of transformation-transformative politics-that has not been prominently addressed in other accounts. The different examples of writing about the transformative performance of our courts in socioeconomic rights cases mentioned above have in common a certain understanding of what transformation entails and, as a result, a certain understanding of what the constitution's transformative orientation requires of courts. This understanding equates transformation with the achievement of certain tangible results or outcomes-be it the concrete alleviation of impoverishment; 7 the achievement of substantive equality; 8 or the protection 4
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Comparative Political Studies, 2006
How does institutional change in established democracies affect the distribution of political power in society? The new constitutional court in Costa Rica allows the authors to analyze the effects of judicial reform on the capacity of politically marginalized groups to safeguard their constitutional rights. Particular attention is paid to homosexuals, AIDS patients, and labor unions. The authors argue that it was not the establishment of the court as such but rather the specific rules regulating access to and cost of approaching the court that enabled marginalized groups to push for their rights and effectively circumvent the traditional policy-making process. Although these groups did not win all their cases, they have nonetheless been able to achieve considerable success in the protection of their previously denied constitutional rights. The legal reform partially redistributed power in society from policy makers to social groups and individuals.
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In an apparently paradoxical or contradictory way, our new century seems to show two trends: on the one hand, an increasingly informal, disorganized, oftentimes violent spate of uprisings, and on the other hand, a growing exploitation of legal strategies. Given these developments, how do we rethink the relationship between social struggles and law? This article employs a casuistic approach in order to explore current modes of interconnections between law and society. It argues that law is that language that through the institution of norms gives shape to the world of social relations. Through this same language, law performs actions in this world that it institutes through its categories. This piece also proposes a technical understanding of the concept of legal mobilization and argues that the innovative use of legal technique (rather than a political grammar) and the institutions of social cooperation could be seen as elements that redescribe and re-signify legal mobilization.
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This study presents an account of the main processes and events in the recent history of the interaction between social movements and the judicial system in Latin America. It first discusses analytical frameworks for the study of social movements and courts in the region. Secondly, it analyses the role of social movements in the creation of new legal opportunities, through their influence in constitutional conventions and judicial reform. Third, it points out some of the main developments in the interaction of movements with the court system, including progressive judicialization as well as counter-legal mobilization. Finally, it addresses multi-level processes of legal mobilization, by pointing out the importance of international litigation and subnational legal mobilization and the impact of federalism