Abstract
Latin American democracies have developed institutions to empower citizens against the state. This article brings attention to an often overlooked, but key, actor in these processes: the legal complex. I argue that the content of reforms designed to strengthen the rule of law partially reflects the interests of politically influential collective legal actors. Political influence is defined as a function of alliances with civil society and embeddedness within decision-making arenas of the state. To develop this argument, the article analyses the slow building of Brazil’s Public Defenders’ Office (PDO). I argue that the office’s initial institutional weakness resulted from defenders’ fragile political position relative to that of prosecutors and the bar during Brazil’s constitutional transition. Its eventual strengthening sixteen years later resulted from changes to the legal complex alliance in its favour, the formation of connections between defenders and civil society, and increased PDO access to policymaking spaces.
Highlights
Brazil’s public system of legal aid has evolved in spurts since democratisation
The analysis shows that Public Defenders’ Office (PDO) defenders in the legal complex were crucial for the 1988 reform, but that their coalition was small and politically weak in relation to coalitions that favoured alternative institutional arrangements
Which causal forces translated these pre-e xisting conditions into specific outcomes, and why? The section develops the argument that political interests, political ideologies, and civil society contributed to this translation, but that the relative political influence of collective legal actors defending the public defender model is the crucial causal factor that determined institutional decisions about Brazil’s PDO.5
Summary
Brazil’s public system of legal aid has evolved in spurts since democratisation. The 1988 constitution that replaced the previous authoritarian structure identified the Defensoria Pública (Public Defenders’ Office, or PDO) as an institution “essential for the administration of justice.” This language broke with the past, as previous documents had acknowledged the right to legal aid without identifying an agency to enforce it. The section develops the argument that political interests, political ideologies, and civil society contributed to this translation, but that the relative political influence of collective legal actors defending the public defender model is the crucial causal factor that determined institutional decisions about Brazil’s PDO.5
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