Book Reviews

Abstract

Scholars of democratization consider the rule of law to be central to the quality and stability of democracy, yet the comparative politics literature has historically ignored an institution positioned to play a critical role in strengthening legality and constitutionality: the judiciary. With regard to Latin America, this neglect results partly from political reality; executives in the region have long manipulated courts, compromising their potential as autonomous political actors. Yet recent scholarship (e.g., Taylor 2004; Uprimny 2004) suggests that while judicial weakness persists in some Latin American countries, in others, social relations are becoming increasingly “judicialized,” and courts are assuming more important political roles. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the contours and consequences of judicialization. One of the few edited volumes to focus exclusively on law, courts, and politics in Latin America, the 12-chapter collection comprises a series of conference papers presented at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London in March 2004. The editors and authors represent a variety of backgrounds (scholars of political science and law, plus a legal practitioner); hail from eight different nations (five Latin American countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden); and offer a rich mix of viewpoints. The volume generates a transnational discussion on themes regarding courts and politics in Latin America that are as broad as they are important. Unfortunately, neither the volume’s introduction nor its afterword teases out the intriguing empirical variation the chapters convey or integrates their fascinating findings into a thematic framework for future inquiries. This review will attempt to do so briefly by summarizing the answers the authors offer to the three questions that constitute the book’s intellectual scaffolding. The first question, alluded to in the introduction, is whether the impetus for judicialization came from elite actors or institutional reform (“from above”) or from society (“from below”), or whether the phenomenon was driven by international developments (“from abroad”) (4–5). The second question follows from the first: have courts modified their decisionmaking practices or taken on broader roles as a result of judicialization? Third, how have the different types of judicialization under study affected regimes, politics, and courts themselves?