Federalism, Legal Strategies and Local Courts in the Field of Women´s Rights in Argentina

ALBA MARÍA RUIBAL

San Juan de Puerto Rico

Congreso; XXXIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA); 2015

The issue of legal mobilization, and in particular feminist legal mobilization, is understudied at the sub-national level in Latin America. Through the study of feminist legal strategies and their interaction with courts in two Argentine provinces, this paper shows that important processes of legal mobilization, particularly in the field of women´s rights, are taking place at the local level. In this way, the paper aims to address two gaps in the literature: on the one hand, the use of legal strategies and the interaction of women´s organizations with courts has not been an issue of concern for studies on gender and federalism; on the other hand, the literature on law and courts in the region has paid insufficient attention to the issue of legal mobilization at the sub-national level. The paper identifies the main factors that allow to account for legal mobilization processes in these cases, and that may be relevant also to explain sub-national feminist legal activism and judicial outcomes in the field of women´s rights in other Latin American contexts, particularly under federal regimes. The paper focuses the sub-national cases of Chubut and Salta, which present significant examples of feminist legal mobilization and which where the place of origin of the cases that have motivated the main Supreme Court´s jurisprudence on women´s rights in the past ten years in the country. Drawing on social movement theory, legal mobilization studies and the field of gender and federalism, the paper analyzes the legal and political opportunity structure as well as the support structure for legal mobilization in these cases, and their role on court outcomes on women´s rights. In particular, it highlights factors related to federalism and the interaction between local and national actors and institutions, in particular the dynamics between local women´s rights advocates and NGOs working at the national level, the importance of federal institutions located at the state-level, and the role of national electoral incentives of provincial governors in explaining compliance with national norms.