PP1036
Analítico de Periódico
BONILLA MALDONADO, Daniel
The Southern turn in comparative (constitutional) law : review essay : the global South and comparative constitutional law / Daniel Bonilla Maldonado
VRÜ. Verfassung und Recht in Übersee, a.54 n.3 (2021), p.415-439
DIREITO COMPARADO, DIREITO CONSTITUCIONAL COMPARADO
Legal academia has historically been diligent in examining legal knowledge as a method of interacting with, controlling, or transforming the world. However, it has been only tangentially concerned with the discourses and practices that constitute the preconditions to produce legal knowledge, as well as those that regulate its value, distribution, and use. The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law is a book that deviates from this general rule in legal academia. The book’s main subject of enquiry is the political economy of legal knowledge. On the one hand, it questions the dominant models that control the production, exchange, and use of legal products. On the other hand, it offers an alternative model for creating, distributing, and operationalizing legal knowledge. To examine the aims of the book, as well as its materialization, I divide this essay into two parts. First, I describe and analyze the two dominant models in the political economy of legal knowledge: the liberal model and the colonial model. Secondly, I examine the arguments by means of which the book questions these models and analyze its normative proposal: the Southern turn in comparative (constitutional) law.