Type: Seminar

Law, Social Movements, and Justice: Views from Latin America
This six-week interdisciplinary seminar offers students an introduction to recent social movements and constitutional transformations in Latin America. Readings and discussions across the first four weeks will prepare the students to attend the 2024 UM Law Transnational Law Workshop (October 18 and 19). The Workshop will bring to campus a dozen participants — legal scholars, activists, and historians — from Chile, Brazil, and Cuba. Our seminar will begin by looking at the massive social upheaval (“estallido social”) that shook Chile in 2019, and the subsequent channeling of much of that energy into a lengthy attempt to draft a new national constitution. We will then examine strategies followed in other countries in the region to address some of the same core issues — democratic participation, gender perspectives and reproductive rights, social services and access to care (including dependent care and end-of-life care), housing rights and land reparations, as well as environmental justice.