PALcast

Today, Fabio talks to Michael McCann, a professor at the University of Washington and former president of the Law and Society Association.

Michael is known for his studies on legal mobilization and recently published an essay (with Filiz Kahraman) arguing that “the distinction between liberal and illiberal, or authoritarian legal orders is misleading”, because most countries, including the US, are “governed by plural, dual, or hybrid legal institutions, principles, and practices”. They also place this duality or hybridity in a political economy context, particularly what they call “racial capitalism”.

Exploring these ideas, Fabio and Michael engage in an insightful conversation, which also touches on issues like the myth of US exceptionalism and how studies of the global south can help illuminate what goes on in the global north.

Michael and Filiz's essay can be consulted at: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-111720-012237

In this episode, Fabio talks to Swethaa Ballakrishnen, a law professor at UCI with training in sociology and law. Swethaa studies legal globalization and how law and legal institutions create, sustain, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities, drawing from fieldwork in multiple sites. But the interview focuses mostly on the book Swethaa edited with Sara Dezalay, called "Invisible Institutionalisms", which questions the process by which academics give meaning to global legal development and how this sometimes reifies categories and hierarchies. This is a timely conversation for a project like PAL that is set off to produce "global collaborative research" involving scholars in both the "North" and the "South".

Today, Fabio talks to Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law and political science at the University of Chicago and the author of "How to save a Constitutional democracy" (with Aziz Huq) and the brand-new "Democracies and International Law". Fabio and Tom discuss how modern autocrats use law to consolidate power, how the US has proven vulnerable to democratic erosion through law, and whether improvements in legal design (domestically or internationally) may help slow or stop these processes.

PALcast host, Fabio de Sa e Silva, explains what he and his guests will be discussing during season 2 of PALcast. For more information on the PAL project, go to www.autocratic-legalism.net

Today, Fabio is interviewed by his student Ahmed Abdelaziz, who also helped with PALcast's production. They talk about the motivations, challenges, and joy of producing PALcast season 1 and what is being planned for season 2

Today, Fabio talks to Kim Lane Scheppele, a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Kim has a very special place in the PAL project. She was the scholar who popularized the term "autocratic legalism" in law and society studies and, back in 2019, she gave a powerful speech at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, urging scholars to study how law had become part of the toolkit of autocrats. PAL was born that day, in response to her call. Fabio and Kim discussed what autocratic legalism is, how it may differ from populism, and how the practices of legalist autocrats can be resisted and stopped

Today, Fabio talks to Helena Alviar, a law professor at Sciences-Po law school, in France, after a prolific career in Colombia. Helena wrote many pieces that are being read in the PAL project, such as a study on the "legal architecture of populisms" and one on "neoliberal economics as authoritarianism". Fabio and Helena discussed these research findings, as well as the epistemology she adopts in her studies, grounded in Critical Legal Studies and Law and Development. They end the conversation with a great exchange on gender and autocratization, a theme that we hope will be brought closer to the center of the PAL project

Today, Fabio talks to Anthony Pereira, a political scientist who teaches at the King's College, in London. Pereira is the author of Political (In)justice, a book on how Latin American dictatorships used the law to repress political dissidents, which he then labeled authoritarian legality. Fabio and Pereira discussed how these lessons from the past could be used in efforts to understand present-day autocratic legalism and what Brazilianists got wrong about Brazil.

Today, Fabio talks to Rick Abel, an Emeritus Law Professor at UCLA. Rick recently published two books on the United States war on terror, which researchers at the PAL project have found particularly useful. The reason is, in these books, Rick shows how a liberal legal order can quickly be turned into an illiberal one, to fight those who are framed as “enemies of the nation”. In the episode, Fabio and Rick discuss what these processes involve and what they tell us about the ability that law and lawyers have, or lack, to protect or to undermine political liberalism