Deep Legality: When Politics Meets the Rule of Law

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Mishella Salomé Romo,Anthony Petros Spanakos
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17753410
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 188–193

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17753410

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

188

Book Review

Deep Legality

When Politics Meets the Rule of Law

by

Mishella Salomé Romo and Anthony Petros Spanakos

Daniel M. Goldstein Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. Durham,

NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012.

Elana Zilberg Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los

Angeles and San Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

George Meszaros Social Movements, Law and the Politics of Land Reform: Lessons from

Brazil. London: Routledge, 2013.

In 1998, a former police officer in Rio de Janeiro asked one of us what a police officer

should do if his two obligations, to enforce the law and to ensure order, came into con-

flict—if enforcing the law threatened the order. Legal norms and law enforcement never

quite overlap perfectly with a prevailing order. The response from mainstream political

scientists studying Latin America has been to see the gaps between law and its enforce-

ment as spaces for the expansion of a universalistic notion of the rule of law (O’Donnell,

1999; 2004). Doing so has been considered necessary for democratization, particularly

in that it universalizes the protection of citizen rights, constrains the potential for arbi-

trary government activity, and empowers institutions to hold government accountable

(Diamond, 1996; Linz and Stepan, 1996: 7; O’Donnell, 1999: 39; Rios-Figueroa and

Staton, 2009: 7; Weingast, 1997).

Scholars normally consider “the rule of law” normatively good, though the term

remains broad and disputed (Fukuyama, 2010; Rios-Figueroa and Staton, 2009; Waldron,

2002). For political scientists and economists, the rule of law offers a benefit in channel-

ing conflicts into bounded spaces and increasing the predictability of outcomes of such

conflicts (Munck, 2009: 124; Touchton, 2016: 196). Such studies generally approach the

rule of law in terms of “well-defined and enforced property, rights, broad access to

those rights, and predictable rules for resolving property rights disputes” (Hoff and

Stiglitz, 2002: 4) as well as a consistent regime of constraint of government power and

protection of legally recognized rights.

It may be worthwhile to set this notion against a broader and deeper concept, legal-

ity: what is lawful, enforceable, permissible, and punishable for people in a given terri-

tory. Legality gives a sense of who performs this enforcement, what traditions inform

the reading of the law, what conditions shape decision making, and who is more enti-

tled to be protected or to resist. It is the place where politics and society converge and

Mishella Salomé Romo holds an M.A. in law and governance from Montclair State University.

Anthony Petros Spanakos is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and Law

at Montclair State University. They thank George Leddy for his comments on earlier drafts of this

review.

753410LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17753410Latin American PerspectivesRomo and Spanakos / BOOK REVIEW

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