This study seeks to explain the paradoxical expansion of constitutional power in Egypt over the past two decades, despite that country's authoritarian political system. I find that the Egyptian regime established an independent constitutional court, capable of providing institutional guarantees on the security of property rights, in order to attract desperately needed private investment after the failure of its socialist-oriented development strategy. The court continued to expand its authority, fundamentally transforming the mode of interaction between state and society by supporting regime efforts to liberalize the economy while simultaneously providing new avenues for opposition activists and human rights groups to challenge the state. The Egyptian case challenges some of our basic assumptions about the conditions under which we are likely to see a judicialization of politics, and it invites scholars to explore the dynamics of judicial politics in other authoritarian political systems.

The end of the millennium has witnessed an enormous expansion in discourses, intervention practices, and social movements opposing violence against women. Not only does this development affect familial and gender inequalities, but it also reshapes the relationships among communities, states, and the global order. This symposium examines these changing relationships by considering how new discourses, laws, and practices about gender violence between intimates develop through local, national, and global processes. It explores local situations from a global perspective and global processes from a local perspective. Thus, it examines the local-global interface in the creation and implementation of social reforms concerning violence against women. We use the case of violence against women because it offers an excellent vantage point for analyzing the creation of an emerging global system of law based in human rights and assessing its impact on local and national laws and practices. It also offers a site to examine how local actors reformulate the content and meaning of global reform discourses. The articles track actors from local to international settings and back again as they negotiate the application of law to violence against women.

This ethnographic analysis of one of the core human rights conventions suggests that despite the lack of enforceability of this convention and its operation within the framework of state sovereignty, it is similar to state law. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, or CEDAW, the major UN convention on the status of women, articulates a vision of women's equal protection from discrimination and addresses gender-based violence as a form of discrimination. It had been ratified by 171 nation states as of mid-2003. Its implementation relies on a complex process of periodic reporting to a global body meeting in New York and a symbiotic if sometimes contentious relationship between government representatives and international and domestic NGOs. Like state law, it serves to articulate and name problems and delineate solutions. It provides a resource for activists endeavoring to address problems of women's status and turns the international gaze on resisting nations. Its regulatory strength depends on the cultural legitimacy of the international process of consensus building and related social movements to define social justice in these terms. Thus, like state law, its impact depends on its cultural legitimacy and its embodiment in local cultures and legal consciousness. This examination of CEDAW as quasi law extends our understanding of law as a plural and a symbolic system rooted in a particular historical moment of globalization.

This paper investigates one example of a process with global implications that I describe as the “regendering” of the state. Regendering refers to the process of bringing to public and legal attention categories and activities that were formerly without name but that constituted harm to women, denied them rights, silenced them, or limited their capacity to engage in actions available to men. I examine the regendering of the Trinidadian state by focusing on one of its most salient examples, the Domestic Violence Act. I identify first the coalition of forces and events that brought the subject of violence against women to lawmakers' attention and made possible the first Domestic Violence Act in the English-speaking Caribbean. I then investigate the interplay between the global discourse about domestic violence law—the passage of which has become an important symbol of the “modern” state—and local concerns about justice, gender, and family. Finally, I consider problems in the implementation of domestic violence law.

Campaigns against domestic violence and projects designed to reform laws are increasingly part of the development initiatives undertaken in African nations. Such projects are subject to standard criticisms of development (e. g., its tendency to enhance the power of donors over recipients) and to more recent concerns raised by postcolonial feminist scholarship (e. g., its tendency to ignore how women's condition in developing nations emerges from relations between donors and recipients). Mindful of these criticisms, many gender and law reform projects begun in Tanzania in the 1990s were designed to foster egalitarian relations between donors and recipients as well as to change laws and legal practices with respect to domestic violence. In addition, many projects relied on interactive workshops to impart information about law reform while empowering local participants. This essay focuses on two domestic violence workshops held in Tanzania in 1998. Linguistic analysis is used to expose the multiple relations of power in these development initiatives. The article demonstrates that demands on the structure of interaction—that is, everyone must be encouraged to participate—can work against creating egalitarian relations and suggests that some challenges to reforming development lie at the level of linguistic interaction.

This study focuses on the trajectories of the Institute of Brazilian Lawyers (Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros, or IAB), created in 1843, and the Order of Lawyers of Brazil (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, or OAB), formed in 1933, extending the analysis up to 1997. The article has three objectives: (a) to point out the role played by expertise in the cohesion of the IAB-OAB, changing its public image from one of the political counterelite to that of representatives of civil society, with the “institutional vocation” to defend juridical order and, later, human and citizenship rights; (b) to describe the social ties that permeate the legal world, preventing internal disputes from becoming deep and lasting cleavages; and (c) to contrast the experience of the Brazilian bar with those of the German and French.

Although the expression special rights emerged most prominently in the twentieth century as a negative response to the civil rights movement, the use of the term has recently acquired a broader, more ubiquitous doctrinal reach. In this paper we elaborate on the meaning of the term special rights as a political device and a way to mobilize power. As a discourse, special rights inverts relations between majority and minority, threatens a cultural contract that distributes universalistic and particular norms, and alters relations of governance. We apply these ideas to an empirical study of special rights politics in three very different issues in Hawai'i-same-sex marriage, the conversion of landholding from leasehold to fee, and indigenous sovereignty. These case studies demonstrate both the pervasiveness and capaciousness of special rights. We show that the use and impact of this discursive strategy varied a great deal from case to case, as did the responses to the accusations of special rights. Our findings suggest that special rights language and its surrogates have become a pervasive part of post-civil rights politics.