The Limits of Judicialization

"This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to take stock of the role that law and courts have played and are playing today in Latin American politics. Beginning in the 1980s, Latin American courts, especially supreme and constitutional courts, left behind decades of subservience and irrelevance to become crucial political actors across the region. In the intervening decades, the law and legal institutions gained prominence as tools for social contestation and change. Like never before, judges entered the political maelstrom, serving as arbiters between the branches of government in heated debates over policy and the reach of presidential or legislative prerogatives. Working with prosecutors, courts also investigated corruption - not only, as in the past, the misdeeds of prior administrations but also those of people still in power. In the process, politicians began to realize that laws and constitutions perhaps meant mostly as window dressing were becoming more costly, as courts might actually hold them to the standards they were creating. Motivated by these developments, individuals and social movements turned the courts into battlegrounds for the realization and expansion of civil, political, cultural, and socio-economic rights"--