Latin American Legal and Institutional Answers to Global Pressures

Date: 

Tuesday, November 29, 2016, 5:00pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

Hauser Hall 104, Harvard Law School, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA

Globalization is presented as a natural, inevitable, and evolutionary process that will bring prosperity and economic growth to all members of the global community. However, the current situation has proved that the system has produced not only winners, but also losers. Moreover, the effects of globalization upon the different regions are diverse. Whilst some countries and communities have benefited from open markets and trade liberalization, others have suffered from market pressures undermining their economic and political powers. 

During the workshop, speakers will explore the Latin American legal and institutional answers to the global pressures in various areas from a legal-institutional perspective as will be presented below. 

 B. Objectives of the Workshop

We seek to strengthen the next generation of scholars in Latin America by placing them in collaboration. In addition, speakers will address the following questions in different research fields: How has the legal-institutional arena been reshaped in response to certain kinds of global pressures? How Latin American politics and policymaking is challenging global trends in legal theory and policy?

C. Structure of the Workshop

The workshop will be held on November 29, 2016 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm at Real Colegio Complutense, 26 Trowbridge St, Cambridge, MA. 

• The debate will be opened to the floor, in which members of the audience will put questions to the speakers.

 

Speakers 

 Lílian Cintra de Melo 

Ph.D. Candidate at the University of São Paulo, Brazil 

Title: Revisiting Internet Law and Policy in Brazil  

Abstract: The Internet exists at the surface of a technologically concealed and institutionally complex ecosystem of governance. Nowadays we experience a shift from institutional-bond policies of sovereign nation states and international agreements to the rising privatization of the global power and the embedded politics of Internet architecture. This works explores the possibility of an upcoming digital feudalism, in which structural transformations will enrich an oligopoly of powerful gatekeepers, through which private interests control public space. 

 Flávio Marques Prol 

Ph.D. Candidate at the University of São Paulo, Brazil  

Title: The Globalization of Legal Fiscal Policy Reforms: The Case of Brazil

Abstract: Debates about debt sustainability, tax revenues, and public expenditures take a considerable space of the public sphere. In the last two decades, fiscal policy has been intensively reformed: in the 1990s, only 5 countries had fiscal rules established by law; by 2015, 85 countries had adopted them. These legal reforms created principles and rules that facilitate the cut down on public expenditures and impose limits to public indebtedness.  This research aims at identifying the recent dynamics of fiscal policy reform, conciliating macroeconomic theories and critical legal theories, by analyzing how Brazil reformed its laws of fiscal policy in the 1990s and in the 2000s.

 Roger Merino Acuña 

Professor at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru) / Ph.D. University of Bath, United Kingdom 

Title: Reimagining the Nation, Rebuilding the State: Extractive Governance, Territorial Rights and Indigenous Self-determination in Latin America

Abstract: This article explores how the politics of indigenous self-determination is challenging the theoretical foundations of International Law and the political economy of resource extraction of the Global South by pushing a political process for reimagining the idea of nation and re-building the state form in Peru and other countries in Latin America.

• Mauro Pucheta 

Ph.D. Researcher at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Title: Mercosur Labour Regulations and the Transnational Challenge: escaping from the ‘intergovernmental’ trap?

Abstract: Free trade across the region should not be considered as the end, but as the means to attain diverse objectives. Although labor cannot be equally regarded and protected within the South-American countries, a recognition of labor rights should be able to empower and hold accountable different labor market actors across the region in order to rebalance the asymmetric relationship between labor and the, which is exacerbated by the global character of the latter. This article aims to analyze the evolution and the existing labor dimension within the Mercosur legal order. Moreover, it explores different options in order to overcome the current Mercosur institutional stalemate.

 

Chair: José Manuel Martínez Sierra, Jean Monnet ad personam professor in European Union Law and Government, RCC Director

Sponsors: RCC, IGLP Harvard Law School