Globalization, Law and Social Change in Latin America

Latin America legal system faced substantial reforms and transformations in this last 15 years. However, the administration of justice continuous to be inefficient affecting drasticallly the society. Globalizaton forces and new domestic actors until now were enable to promote social justice to the countries.The political and social challenges of democratization and globalization have affected al of them, but these economic and social processes have no doubt affected political and legal culture in different ways. Even though there were significant reforms, democratization and liberalization were not sufficient to overcome difficulties against the implementation of social justice. Many Latin American countries have failed to improve in a more forceful way the distribution of resources and break the strong hierarchical tissue that prevented the law from fulfilling its role in society. In the present context of Latin America, the type of justification of the rule of law one prefers is likely to make a significant difference in terms of the policies that might be advocated. In particular, there is the danger derived from the fact that nowadays legal and judicial reforms are strongly oriented toward the perceived interests of the dominant sector basically domestic and international commercial law, some aspects of civil law, and the more purely repressive aspects of criminal law.  At the heart of the problem may be the inability of the reconfigured state to tackle the growing social and political inequality that is central to the vulnerability problem. As long as inequality persists, it is unlikely that the picture of increased vulnerability and low adaptive capacity among the poor in Latin America will change. This study analyzes in the past 15 years  the major challenges for Latin American society to achive a more democratic legal system.