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The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America
Inequality and the Rule of Law
This book documents the corrosive effect of social exclusion on democracy
and the rule of law. It shows how marginalization prevents citizens from
effectively engaging even the best legal systems, how politics creeps into
prosecutorial and judicial decision making, and how institutional change
is often nullified by enduring contextual factors. It also shows, however,
how some institutional arrangements can overcome these impediments.
The argument is based on extensive fieldwork and original data on the
investigation and prosecution of more than five hundred police homicides
in five legal systems in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It includes both
qualitative analyses of individual violations and prosecutions and quan-
titative analyses of broad patterns within and across jurisdictions. The
book offers a structured comparison of police, prosecutorial, and judicial
institutions in each location and shows that analyses of any one of these
organizations in isolation miss many of the essential dynamics that underlie
an effective system of justice.
Daniel M. Brinks is assistant professor of government at the University
of Texas at Austin, teaching comparative politics and public law, with an
emphasis on politics and democracy in Latin America. He holds a Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Notre Dame and a J.D., cum laude,
from the University of Michigan Law School. Professor Brinks’s research
has appeared in journals such as
Comparative Politics
,
Studies in Compar-
ative International Development
,
Comparative Political Studies
, and the
Texas International Law Journal
.Among his many awards and accolades,
Brinks has received Honorable Mention in the Gabriel Almond Com-
petition for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics (2006), the Helen
Kellogg Institute for International Studies Visiting Fellowship (2006–07),
the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Notre Dame Graduate School Award in the
Social Sciences (2004), the American Bar Foundation Doctoral Fellowship
(2002–04), the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation
Research Fellowship (2000–01), and a Fulbright Fellowship (2000–01,
declined).
The Judicial Response to Police Killings
in Latin America
Inequality and the Rule of Law
DANIEL M. BRINKS
The University of Texas at Austin
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