The North-South global divide is as much about perception and prejudice as it is about economic disparities. Latin America is no less ruled by hegemonic misrepresentations of its national legal systems. The European image of its laws mostly upholds legal legitimacy and international comity. By contrast, diagnoses of excessive legal formalism, an extraordinary gap between law and action, inappropriate European transplants, elite control, pervasive inefficiencies, and massive corruption call for wholesale law reform. Misrepresented to the level of becoming fictions, these ideas nevertheless have profound influence on US foreign policy, international agency programs, private disputes, and academic research. Jorge Esquirol identifies their materialization in global governance – mostly undermining Latin American states in legal geopolitics – and their deployment by private parties in transnational litigation and international arbitration. Bringing unrelenting legal realism to comparative law, this study explores new questions in international relations, focusing on the power dynamics among national legal systems.
Q. Why this book, and why now?
This book is the culmination of a career’s worth of work on Latin America. It fits together insights developed in past projects and applies them to new research on transnational litigation and international arbitration. It’s now that the fuller picture emerges.
Q. Who should read this book?
Anybody interested in ideas. Outwardly, it is a book about Latin American law and legal geopolitics. When thinking about law in the region, two general ideas predominate. One is that national law in Latin American countries is Western and derivative of the continental European tradition. The other is that law in Latin America fails to function like law should– that it has effectively failed. These notions are played and replayed in many contexts to advance one position or another of international politics and transnational disputes. The book shows how these ideas are only very partial and incomplete truths and why international policies and transnational adjudication based on them are faulty.
However, the underlying storyline of the book is how certain ideas emerge, become hegemonic, and are marshalled by individuals in different settings for particular gain. It just so happens that the ideas here are ideas about law in Latin America, the vehicle for hegemony is legal studies, and the settings are international politics and transnational disputes.
Q. What is the most important takeaway you hope your readers gain from this book?
How many important things in our lives – like the legal regime – are built on perception. Certainly there are many material disparities across people and groups. But how we think about them – in dominant collective ways – are elemental to the differences we perceive between ourselves and others. Many of these differences are less solid than they first appear. Yet sometimes entrenched ideas are more difficult to change than any material substance they represent. In this same vein, Latin American legal systems are less unlike other legal systems than we normally think.
Q. How did you decide on the title and cover art?
Both of these were some of the most challenging parts of the project. I’m exaggerating, but it was tough. I had a lot of help from friends. I’ll let readers try to figure out where the cover picture is from.
Jorge L. Esquirol is a graduate of the Harvard Law School J.D. 1989 and doctorate in law, the S.J.D. 2001. Finance major summa cum laude from Georgetown University 1986. Professor Esquirol is a founding faculty member of the FIU College of Law 2002. Previously, he was on the faculty at Northeastern University School of Law from 1997-2002 and earlier was the Director of Academic Affairs at the Harvard Law School Graduate Program from 1992-1997. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Law for the 2015-16 academic year at the University of Trento, Italy. He has also been a visiting research professor at the Watson Institute at Brown University, visiting professor at the University of Miami School of Law and the University of Denver College of Law, a resident scholar at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre), France, and a visiting researcher at the Constitutional Court of Colombia. He clerked for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami and was an associate attorney at the Wall Street firm of Shearman and Sterling. Professor Esquirol is fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. He is the author of numerous publications in the areas of law-and-development, comparative law, property, and commercial law. He frequently lectures abroad. At FIU, he teaches commercial law, comparative law, and international trade law.