An Introduction to Brazilian Environmental Law

Brazil plays a leading role in environmental issues. From Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to Bali in 2008, no major international discussion on the environment has occurred without Brazilian participation. Two decades ago, Brazil was on the defensive on this critical front. Since then, a number of structural changes -- linked to redemocratization and the growing involvement of civil society in the policy debate -- have led people to address environmental challenges in a proactive and transparent way, ...

Defending Public Prosecutors and Defining Brazil's Environmental 'Public Interest': A Review of Lesley Mcallister's Making Law Matter: Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions in Brazil

Making Law Matter: Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions in Brazil, by Lesley McAllister, is reviewed.

A Response to Professor Mcallister's Reply to My Review of Making Law Matter

As Professor Lesley McAllister notes, her book makes an important contribution to the knowledge about environmental enforcement, namely its central finding that prosecutorial enforcement is in many ways a success story -- it has enhanced the effectiveness of environmental law in Brazil, and a similar approach may be useful in other national jurisdictions. As Professor McAllister explains at the outset, Making Law Matter is about Brazilian prosecutors who act a lot like public interest environ...

On Environmental Enforcement and Compliance: A Reply to Professor Crawford's Review of Making Law Matter: Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions in Brazil

Over the past three decades, laws and institutions dedicated to environmental protection have been established in most countries throughout the world. Over one hundred countries, for example, have environmental impact assessment laws, requiring that some study of environmental impacts be conducted before proposed projects receive governmental approval. Most countries have environmental laws that restrict air and water pollution as well as natural resource degradation. Among Latin American cou...

Writing the Law of Latin America

Latin America scholars have largely neglected the constructivist role of legal discourse as it relates to the region's national legal systems. This dimension of law includes the range of traditional legal scholarship in all its various stripes. It also extends to other forms of legal writing, including expert consultant reports, multidisciplinary studies, and transnational work. An example of the latter is Lesley McAllister's Making Law Matter: Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions ...

Environmental Rights and Brazil's Obligations in the Inter-American Human Rights System

In the four decades since the United Nations convened its first environmental conference, nearly all global and regional human rights bodies have considered the links between environmental degradation and internationally guaranteed human rights. International human rights petition procedures allow those whose rights have been negatively affected by environmental conditions to bring international pressure to bear when governments lack the will to prevent or halt severe pollution that threatens...

Historical Views On Environment and Environmental Law in Brazil

The key processes that produced Brazil today lie in the Brazilian precolonial and colonial period. Those times were responsible for laying the foundations of nationhood and creating a new society, something different, not only for the native people living in Brazil, but also for the Portuguese colonizers. From the standpoint of the European conqueror, the Portuguese discovered Brazil, and despite the importance of the many cultures that contributed to the civilizing process of the country, th...