Harvard Law School
Graduate Program
S.J.D. 1st Year Reading List
Title:
Material Democracy:
Legal and Institutional Innovation in Latin America
Carlos Portugal Gouvêa
cgouvea@law.harvard.edu
Contents
1. PROPOSAL ABSTRACT
1
2. FIELDS OF STUDY
2
2.1. LAW AND DEVELOPMENT
2
2.2. DEMOCRATIC ANALYSIS OF LAW:
4
2.3. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW
6
2.4. THEORY OF INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
9
1
1. Proposal Abstract
The objective of my S.J.D. thesis is to demonstrate that legal analysis of institutional
reforms must include a concern about its distributive impacts on society, considering that the
greatest challenges faced by democracy in Latin America nowadays are its extreme inequality
and concentration of wealth. My assumption is that this concern could have a positive effect, not
only because it could avoid the implementation of reforms that would increase inequality, but
also because this information could have a transformative effect, creating possibilities for legal
and institutional innovations that could strengthen democracy and economic development in the
region.
To achieve this objective, I proposed the hypothesis that the weakness of the democratic
process causes the negative distributive effects of laws. In societies with high inequalities, this
weakness of democracy is not only caused by limited participation on political process, but also
by the use of concentrated economic power to influence political decisions, creating a cycle that
perpetuates inequality. I will test this hypothesis studying the relationship between the three
waves of reforms that impacted the region in the last decades - the transition to democracy, the
process of economic liberalization, and the contemporary projects of legal and institutional
reforms - evaluating if the proposed analysis of distributive effects of laws could suggest
strategic reforms capable of breaking this cycle.
The expected outcome of this study is threefold. First, I would like to contribute to the