Law and Public Policy in Brazil and the United States: A North-South Dialogue
14 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2022
Date Written: April 27, 2022
Abstract
This article grew out of a collaboration between Professors Bucci and Clune exploring commonalities in Law and Public Policy (LPP) in the Brazil and the U.S. The LPP approach in Brazil is illustrated by Professor Bucci's book on LPP (untranslated to English) in which she proposed analytical frameworks that can be applied to different areas of public policy. She then partnered with students and fellow faculty to test the utility of her proposed frameworks in a variety of case studies. LPP in Brazil must attend to the process of re-democratization in Brazil after 1985 that led to the Constitution of 1988, one of the transformative constitutions in the third wave of democracies between 1970"2000. Despite being a composite of different and sometimes opposing political trends, the 1988 Constitution has a "progressive side" influenced by the model of the Portuguese Constitution emerging from the post-authoritarian period of 1976. On new legal realism and law and development in Latin America and the United States, Bucci agrees with scholars who reject the idea of Latin American countries as mere receptors of theories of law produced in the north. In present times there are reasons for questioning idealization of U.S. law, as the same pathologies that have been used to describe Latin American law exist in the U.S.
This article was written as part of a collaboration, Bucci and Clune: A South-North Dialogue. Professor William Clune's article can be found on SSRN at this link:https://ssrn.com/abstract=4095403
Keywords: Law and public policy, progressivism, interdisciplinary studies, law and social science, new legal realism, law and development, comparative law, Federalism
JEL Classification: K32: Environmental, Health, and Safety Law
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