This review essay analysis advances in the study of law and politics in Latin America, discussing five recent books that contribute to bridging the gap between the literature on judicial behavior, which tended to focus quite narrowly on intra-court dynamics and factors including institutional design and the interests and motivations of judges, and the judicial politics literature, which emphasizes factors external to courts, such as processes of socio-legal mobilization, “rights revolutions”, and the transformation of social and political conflicts into legal disputes. It argues that renewed interdisciplinary debates in the study of law and politics are leading to richer and more complex explanations of legal behavior and legal change.
Latin American Research Review (LARR), Vol. 55 (1), 2020: 159-167.