Varun Gauri

Vivek Maru

The United Nations estimates that four billion people worldwide live outside the protection of the law. These people can be driven from their land, intimidated by violence, and excluded from society. This book is about community paralegals - sometimes called barefoot lawyers - who demystify law and empower people to advocate for themselves. These paralegals date back to 1950s South Africa and are active today in many countries, but their role has largely been ignored by researchers. Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice is the first book on the subject. Focusing on paralegal movements in six countries, Vivek Maru, Varun Gauri, and their coauthors have collected rich, vivid stories of paralegals helping people to take on injustice, from domestic violence to unlawful mining to denial of wages. From these stories emerges evidence of what works and how. The insights in the book will be of immense value in the global fight for universal justice. This title is also available as Open Access.

Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice

Daniel M. Brinks

This book is a first-of-its-kind, five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on social and economic rights in each country. The book develops new methodologies for analyzing the sources of and variation in social and economic rights litigation, explains why actors are now turning to the courts to enforce social and economic rights, measures the aggregate impact of litigation in each country, and assesses the relevance of the empirical findings for legal theory. This book argues that courts can advance social and economic rights under the right conditions precisely because they are never fully independent of political pressures.

Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World

Courting Social Justice

School Choice in Chile examines the dramatic educational decentralization and privatization of schools in Chile. In the early 1980s, the Pinochet regime decentralized schooling, providing vouchers for parental choice of public or private schools. At the same time, the government supposedly gave the administration of schools to local municipalities. Although the reform has merit and is defended by some as a major achievement, Varun Gauri shows the many ways in which it has not worked. In this process of reform, neither the administration of schools nor school content was really decentralized from the Ministry of Education, nor did students gain equality of educationaly opportunity or better schooling outcomes. These failures of the post-welfare model are due partly to Chile’s political and economic problems of the era, but are also evidence of flaws at its core, at least where education is concerned. The study presents data for an original survey of 726 households in Greater Santiago that finds more evidence for social and economic stratification among Chilean schools than past analyses have shown. Gauri finds that information about school quality, a sense of entitlement, and the use of specific search techniques increase the odds that a child attends a school with high achievement scores. Gauri offers some insights as he supports the criticism that market forces might exacerbate inequalities without necessarily generating clear gains in academic achievement. In the new system, many parents continued to be ill-informed about differences among schools, nonacademic factors played a major role in school selection, schools appeared to use entrance exams to practice a form of “creaming,” and parental wealth was a strong determinant of whether families were willing and able to take full advantage of choice programs. These are extremely timely findings, especially in light of the current debate over school choice and vouchers in the United States. Because the United States has little experience in school choice, School Choice in Chile presents a convincing and necessary report on an almost twenty-year-old experience with information from which all nations can learn. Parents, policy analysts in education and social welfare, as well as those studying political science, public policy, and education, will find it extremely useful.

Varun Gauri

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