The Movement of the Landless (MST) and the juridical field in Brazil (original) (raw)

Movement of the Landless (MST) and Juridical Modalities of Legal Change in Brazil

2005

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.

The Movement of the Landless (MST), juridical field, and legal change in Brazil

2005

* An early draft of this chapter was presented at the workshop on ''Fundamental Rights in the Balance: New Ideas on the Rights to Land, Housing and Property,''October 16–18, 2003, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, UK. The paper owes much to discussions with Eugênio Facchini Neto, Jacques Távora Alfonsin, Ipojucan Vecchi, Avelino Strozake, Claudio Pavao, Luıs Cristiano, and Adrián Gurza Lavalle. The editors, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A.

The legal field as a battleground for social struggle: Reclaiming law from the margins

Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 2021

Scepticism towards law's potential of fostering social change has been widespread in critical theory and contributed to strengthen social movements' mistrust vis-à-vis the use of legal tools to advance their claims. Such "anti-law" posture is based on the assumption that law would formalise existing relations of domination and posits the need for a political praxis liberated from "legalistic drifts". This article discusses how legal tactics in favour of social change have been employed by social movements exerting a counter-hegemonic use of law in the post-2008 economic crisis conjuncture. The example of the struggle for the commons will be analysed as paradigmatic of how the interests of the marginalised can be protected by resorting to existing property arrangements, and how it is possible to reclaim law from the margins.

What's legit? Critiques of law and strategies of rights. Introduction.

2020

LEGAL CRITICISM HAS RECEIVED A GREAT DEAL OF ATTENTION. IN RECENT YEARS. ON THE ONE HAND, LAW IS PRAISED FOR BEING A CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENT, ON THE OTHER, IT IS CRITICISED FOR BEING AN INSTRUMENT OF STATE OPPRESSION. LEGAL CRITICISM’S STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH THIS AMBIVALENCE DIFFER GREATLY: WHILE SOME THEORETICIANS SEEK TO TRANSCEND THE INSTITUTION OF LAW ALTOGETHER, OTHERS ADVOCATE A TRANSFORMATION OF THE FORM OF LAW OR TRY TO EMPLOY COUNTERHEGEMONIC STRATEGIES TO CHANGE THE CONTENT OF LAW, DECONSTRUCT ITS BASIS OR INVENT RIGHTS. THIS VOLUME POINTS OUT TRANSITIONS AND EXHIBITS IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES OF THESE APPROACHES. WITHOUT DENYING THE DIVERSITY OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF CRITIQUE, THEY ARE RELATED TO ONE ANOTHER WITH THE AIM OF BROADENING THE DEBATES WHICH ALL TOO OFTEN ARE CONDUCTED ONLY WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE SEPARATE THEORETICAL CURRENTS.

Courts, socio-economic rights and transformative politics

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

Rights beyond the courtroom

2020

The judicial litigation on socio-economic rights has assumed greater importance in the last two decades. This tendency to seek social change through the courts generated a long tradition of research on the role of political and institutional actors and legal mobilization in the enforcement of rights in US, some European countries and recently in the Global South. However, a significant portion of the Brazilian constitutional doctrine remains oblivious to investigate the phenomenon of constitutional judicial litigation of socio-economic rights, in a practical and empirical look, from the functioning of democratic institutions. The lack of empirical studies in Law in order to verify this hypothesis justified the adoption of the case study as an interdisciplinary methodological strategy between Law and Political Science. As a result, the Supreme Court had not been identified as an autonomous agent capable of implementing a relevant social change and ensure the protection of social righ...