Courts that Matter

Sandra Botero is Associate Professor at Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia). She is the co-editor of The Limits of Judicialization: From Progress to Backlash in Latin America (2022).

• 1. Introduction; 2. Co-producing judicial impact; 3. Collaborative oversight arenas; 4. Assessing the effects of monitoring mechanisms and legal constituencies; 5. Low impact cases; 6. Collaborative Monitoring in India; 7. Conclusions; 8. Appendices.

'Courts that Matter is the best book on judicial impact I've read in some time. Botero's key empirical contribution is to highlight the use of monitoring mechanisms and collaborative oversight arenas by courts seeking to avoid some longstanding pitfalls facing effective implementation of their decisions. The book's theoretical contribution is even more ambitious. Botero shows that at their best, judicial institutions sometimes collaborate with other key actors in the state and civil society to foster increased attention to, and deliberation about, entrenched practices of rights violation. Rather than displacing democratic politics from the outside, court decisions sometimes create new political spaces in which democratic politics can proceed.' Thomas Moylan Keck, Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs