Ruling the Law
Legitimacy and Failure in Latin American Legal Systems

Challenges the distorted hegemonic accounts of Latin American law and reveals their geopolitical and economic consequences in the world today.

Jorge L. Esquirol (Author)

9781316630921, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 May 2022

299 pages, 1 table
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

The North-South global divide is as much about perception and prejudice as it is about economic disparities. Latin America is no less ruled by hegemonic misrepresentations of its national legal systems. The European image of its laws mostly upholds legal legitimacy and international comity. By contrast, diagnoses of excessive legal formalism, an extraordinary gap between law and action, inappropriate European transplants, elite control, pervasive inefficiencies, and massive corruption call for wholesale law reform. Misrepresented to the level of becoming fictions, these ideas nevertheless have profound influence on US foreign policy, international agency programs, private disputes, and academic research. Jorge L. Esquirol identifies their materialization in global governance - mostly undermining Latin American states in legal geopolitics - and their deployment by private parties in transnational litigation and international arbitration. Bringing unrelenting legal realism to comparative law, this study explores new questions in international relations, focusing on the power dynamics among national legal systems.

Introduction
1. The fiction of legal Europeanness
2. The fiction of failed law
3. The geopolitics of Latin American legal fictions
4. Latin American cases
Concluding thoughts.

Subject Areas: Laws of Specific jurisdictions [LN], Law & society [LAQ], Comparative law [LAM], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Law [L], International institutions [JPSN], International relations [JPS], Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP], Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4]