Dialogue with Dictators: Judicial Resistance in Argentina and Brazil

Throughout the world, judges are often asked to implement the repressive measures of authoritarian rulers. Which conception of legal interpretation and judicial role, if any, make judges more likely to resist such pressures? That question, central to Anglo-American jurisprudence since the Hart-Fuller debate, is addressed by examining recent military rule in Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, judges were sympathetic to military rule and so criticized its “excesses” in the jurisprudential terms favored by the juntas: positivism and legal realism. Brazilian judges, by contrast, were largely unsympathetic to military rule, and so couched their criticism in terms of natural law, in order to raise larger questions and reach a broader public. Empirical study of the cases and conceptual analysis of existing theories both reveal that no view of legal interpretation inherently disposes its adherents to either accept or repudiate repressive law. Contingent political circumstances—the rulers' favored form of legal rhetoric, and the degree to which judges accept the need for a period of extra-constitutional rule—determine which legal theory fosters most resistance. But since most authoritarian rulers nominally affirm their constitutional predecessors' positive law and are often unwilling to codify publicly their most repressive policies, strict literalism usually offers the most congenial idiom for judicial resistance to such regimes.