Browsing by Autor "Julieta Lemaitre"

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Finding the Roads to Justice? Examining Trajectories of Transition for Internally Displaced Women in Colombia
(Ubiquity Press, 2017) Kristin Bergtora Sandvik; Julieta Lemaitre
Colombia’s transitional justice provisions for victims and women in particular, have attained global best practice status. What will be the real impact for victims of the civil war? How can the rule of law help Colombia find the roads to justice? Based on a 2010–2014 in-depth, multi-method study of the legal mobilization strategies of displaced women’s organizations, we argue that the examination of women’s transitional justice should not be reduced to an assessment of the implementation of a sophisticated and celebrated legal and political framework. We suggest that a possible way of developing a more complex transitional justice narrative is to examine what the turn to transitional justice is a shift from: by highlighting the temporal and temporary aspects of laws, legal institutions and legal identities in the Colombian armed conflict, we can achieve a better understanding of what previous legal transitions have meant for this particular group of victims. We suggest that this approach can be useful for developing analytical perspectives for appraising how the post-conflict framework plays out for victims.
Manuel Quintín Lame: Legal Thought as Minor Jurisprudence
(2017) Julieta Lemaitre
Manuel Quintín Lame (1880-1967) was an indigenous peasant leader in southern Colombia who wrote profusely about law and justice, mostly petitions to authorities, but also open letters about land rights for his followers and sympathizers. He demanded collective land rights for the remaining indigenous peoples, based on a creative interpretation of existing statutory law, on a strategic use of neo-scholastic jurisprudence and on his own reported visions and hallucinations. Lame’s lawyering de-territorialized legal expertise by claiming to be both indigenous and a lawyer, performing that authority in tandem with appeals to poetry and emotion. In his alternative vision, the social contract is not a pact among equals, but instead a fragile armistice between an invading army and a vanquished people, justified in their disobedience by the very theory he challenges. Can Lame´s writings be read today as jurisprudence, in the intriguing mode of a minor jurisprudence? Perhaps: he is certainly speaking from a minor location, from a situated, historical subordinate position that uses the dominant language of law, its ideas and canon, not to represent or speak-for a group, but instead to destabilize the complacency of the majority, and suggest alternatives.
The Moderating Influence of International Courts on Social Movements: Evidence from the IVF Case Against Costa Rica.
(National Institutes of Health, 2017) Julieta Lemaitre; Rachel Sieder
Feminists and religious conservatives across the globe have increasingly turned to courts in their battles over abortion. Yet while a significant literature analyzes legal mobilization on abortion issues, it tends to focus predominantly on domestic scenarios. In this article, we consider the effects of this contentious engagement of pro-choice and anti-abortion movements in international human rights fora, asking what happens to social movement claims when they reach international human rights courts. We answer the question through a detailed description of a single case, <i>Gretel Artavia Murillo et al. v. Costa Rica</i>, decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2012 but with ongoing repercussions for abortion rights, given its authoritative interpretation of embryonic right to life. Through our analysis of <i>Artavia Murillo</i>, we show how legal mobilization before international human rights courts moderates social movement claims within the legal arena, as rivals respond to one another and argue within the frame of courts' norms and language.
Violence and Neo-constitutionalism: A Comment on Breny Mendoza’s Text
(2012) Julieta Lemaitre
In his work on civil wars Stathis Kalyvas (2006) argues persuasively that the violence of civil wars combines aggression against a political enemy with violence that is nurtured under much more familiar circumstances. Many acts can be explained by greed, envy, revenge, lust, family hatreds and the other petty reasons that make humans so endlessly creative in their betrayal and hatred. Wars are also, of course, rife with all the selflessness and heroism that we can muster, as well as with meaningless tasks, and endless waiting, and ordinary acts of survival. In many ways a civil war is also ordinary life; eating, sleeping, raising children, dying and surviving. But what is perhaps more remarkable is how war adds unsuspected possibilities to ordinary human frailness: the possibility of bringing to violence the passions we usually keep in check. Coveting a neighbor’s land, being betrayed by a friend, losing a lover, a long standing family feud, now take on the form of untethered partisan violence.