Law and Development in Latin America

Abstract

This article revisits Law and Development in Latin America through a framework that combines insights from dependency theory and institutionalism. It argues that global conditions shape, but do not determine, domestic development outcomes. Rather, development is an institutionally driven process that unfolds within the possibilities and constraints established by global governance and domestic political choices. Law is constitutive of this process: legal institutions materialize social preferences and political struggles, while in turn structuring the organization of economic and political activity. From this perspective, development cannot be understood as a linear sequence of stages in which countries advance by importing legal institutions associated with more developed economies. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of Brazil, complemented by comparisons with other Latin American countries, the article reconstructs the evolution of Law and Development in the region through three periods defined by changing global–local relations. The first period, shaped by embedded liberalism and the Cold War, provided substantial domestic policy space for developmentalist strategies, including state-led industrialization. The second, associated with the Washington Consensus, economic globalization, and the diffusion of rule-of-law reforms, witnessed the retreat of the developmental state, market-oriented reforms, and the rise of regulatory capitalism and independent economic institutions. The third, still unfolding, is characterized by the fragmentation of globalization, the weakening of multilateral governance, and the growing politicization of international economic relations. These transformations have reopened space for state intervention while generating competing domestic strategies, particularly neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism, alongside new tensions surrounding democratic and regulatory backsliding.