Envisioning Reform: Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Improving Judicial Performance in Latin AmericaJudicial reform became an important part of the agenda for development in Latin America early in the 1980s, when countries in the region started the process of democratization. Connections began to be made between judicial performance and market-based growth, and development specialists turned their attention to “second generation” institutional reforms. Although considerable progress has been made already in strengthening the judiciary and its supporting infrastructure (police, prosecutors, public defense counsel, the private bar, law schools, and the like), much remains to be done. Linn Hammergren’s book aims to turn the spotlight on the problems in the movement toward judicial reform in Latin America over the past two decades and to suggest ways to keep the movement on track toward achieving its multiple, though often conflicting, goals. After Part I’s overview of the reform movement’s history since the 1980s, Part II examines five approaches that have been taken to judicial reform, tracing their intellectual origins, historical and strategic development, the roles of local and international participants, and their relative success in producing positive change. Part III builds on this evaluation of the five partial approaches by offering a synthetic critique aimed at showing how to turn approaches into strategies, how to ensure they are based on experiential knowledge, and how to unite separate lines of action. |
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... role in checking illegal actions by governmental and private actors.6 “Strengthening,” a favorite word of reformers, meant increasing judicial independence, updating laws and internal processes, professionalizing judges and other ...
... role in and impact on broader societal development and thus implies different objectives and means to reach them. Moreover, although a truly “holistic” project often works on several fronts at once, the compatibility of the aims ...
... role and operations, which suggests that it may itself require modification.10 The various Latin American approaches to reform in some sense arise as extrapolations from this traditional model and, to the extent they do, may be ...
... role. Although both points will be elaborated at length in the following chapters, a brief historical treatment of the movement's evolution in Latin America provides us with a start. Judicial reform became a part of the Third World ...
... role in promoting economic growth and explicitly prohibited political involvement). The initial response was to focus on civil and commercial law, which was believed most relevant to the economic mandate.34 Timing was also critical ...
Other editions - View all
Envisioning Reform: Improving Judicial Performance in Latin America Linn Hammergren Limited preview - 2010 |
Envisioning Reform: Improving Judicial Performance in Latin America Linn A. Hammergren No preview available - 2007 |