Judicialisation and Juridification in Latin America

Dr Oliver Wilson Nunn

This session explores the contested proliferation and protagonism of legal institutions, agents, language, and logics in Latin America. It offers an overview of the diverse areas of social and political life that have been affected by these changes. It then draws on specific case studies from Guatemala, Colombia, and Argentina that engage with some of the most notable forms of judicialization and juridification in recent decades: indigenous rights; the rights of nature; and collective rights to health, housing, and the environment.  

By combining general and specific studies of judicialization and juridification in Latin America, we will probe several theoretical questions that you should consider when doing the required reading. What and where are the boundaries between law and politics? By which parameters is the ‘success’ of judicialization measured? Is the trend towards judicialization best understood as the result of structural transformation, the actions of specific agents, or both? What is the legacy of colonialism on judicialized conflicts? What are the possibilities and pitfalls of scholarly and creative ‘representations’ of judicialization? 

The seminar will emphasize judicialization and its discontents as embodied phenomena that imbricate a wide array of state and societal actors and have profoundly ambivalent effects on the experience of violence and injustice across Latin America. 

Key Issues 

  • Separation of state powers 

  • Legal pluralism 

  • Law, democracy, and accountability 

  • Law and environmental crisis 

  • Law, colonialism, and capitalism 

  • Criminalization of corruption 

Required Reading 

  • Botero, Sandra, Daniel Brinks, and Ezequiel González-Ocantos. ‘Working in New Political Spaces: The Checkered History of Latin American Judicialization’. In The Limits of Judicialization: From Progress to Backlash in Latin America, edited by Sandra Botero, Daniel Brinks and Ezequiel González-Ocantos, 1–38. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 
     
  • Fainstein, Carla. ‘Social and Symbolic Effects in a Judicialized Urban Conflict: The Case of Argentina’s Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin”. In Vivre et construire le droit à la ville: experiences au Sud, edited by Amandine Spire & Marianne Morange, 131–144. Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pupo.19900  
     
  • González-Serrano, María Ximena. ‘Rights of Nature, an Ornamental Legal Framework: Water Extractivism and Backbone Rivers with Rights in Colombia’. The Journal of Peasant Studies (2024): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2349228 
     
  • Sieder, Rachel. ‘The Juridification of Politics’. In The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology, edited by Marie-Claire Foblets et al., 701–715. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.  
     

Further Reading 

  • Álvez-Marin, Amaya, Camila Bañales-Seguel, Rodrigo Castillo, Claudia Acuña-Molina, and Pablo Torres. ‘Legal Personhood of Latin American Rivers: Time to Shift Constitutional Paradigms’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 12, no. 2 (2021): 147–176. 
     
  • Arcidiácono, Pilar and Gustavo Gamallo (eds.). La otra ventanilla: judicialización de conflictos sociales en Argentina. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2023. 
     
  • Brunnegger, Sandra and Karen Ann Faulk, (eds.). A Sense of Justice: Legal Knowledge and Lived Experience in Latin America. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2016. 
     
  • Christel, Lucas G. and Ricardo A. Gutiérrez, ‘Making Rights Come Alive: Environmental Rights and Modes of Participation in Argentina’. Journal of Environment & Development 26, no. 3 (2017): 322–347. 
     
  • Conde, Marta, Mariana Walter, Lucrecia Wagner, Grettel Navas. ‘Slow Justice and Other Unexpected Consequences of Litigation in Environmental Conflicts’. Global Environmental Change 83 (2023): 1–10. 
     
  • Eckert, Julia, Brian Donahoe, Christian Strümpell and Zerrin Özlem Biner (eds.). Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Lawʼs Transformations. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 
     
  • Hernández Castillo, Rosalva Aída. Multiple Injustices. Indigenous Women, Law and Political Struggle in Latin America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. 
     
  • Lamprea, Everaldo. ‘The Judicialization of Health Care: A Global South Perspective’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 13 (2017): 431–449. 
     
  • Macpherson, Elizabeth, Axel Borchgrevink, Rahul Ranjan, Catalina Vallejo Piedrahíta. ‘Where Ordinary Laws Fall Short: ‘Riverine Rights’ and Constitutionalism’, Griffith Law Review 30, no. 3 (2021): 438–473. DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2021.1982119. 
     
  • Merlinsky, Gabriela. Política, derechos y justicia ambiental: El conflicto del Riachuelo. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013. 
     
  • Montoya, Ainhoa. ‘Post-extractive Juridification: Undoing the Legal Foundations of Mining in El Salvador’, Geoforum 138 (2023): 1–10. 
     
  • Sieder, Rachel, Line Schjolden and Alan Angell (eds.). The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2005. 
     
  • Sieder, Rachel (ed.). Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 
     
  • Sieder, Rachel, Ainhoa Montoya and Yacotzin Braco-Espinosa (eds.). ‘Extractivismo minero en América Latina: la juridificación de los conflictos socioambientales’, Íconos 72, no xxvi (2022). 
     
  • Zaffaroni, Eugenio Raúl, Cristina Caamaño, Valeria Vegh Weis. Lawfare: The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South. Boston: Brill, 2023. 

Note: Consult the complete bibliography in the University's Online Reading Lists here.