The Movement of the Landless (MST) and the juridical field in Brazil

This working paper focuses on the Movement of the Landless (MST) and the various legal strategies used to redefine property law in Brazil. Through a number of legal strategies MST has helped produce watershed high court rulings, contributed to the process of constitutionalising law, and made access to land more equitable in parts of Brazil by redefining property rights in practice.The paper explores legal change triggered by the strategic action through what Bourdieu calls the juridical field (relating to the function and administration of the judicial system). The author argues that MST has been successful in pushing forward legal change through this field for two broad reasons:the MST’s ability to concentrate the talents of diverse juridical actors on defending its claims has made it an important catalyst for legal change through the juridical field. The movement’s ability to mobilise highly skilled legal talent has been built by mobilising across multiple fields, not just the juridicalthe MST in the 1990s had new opportunities to set juridical modalities of change in motion because of a number of favourable changes in both the movement and juridical fields. These changes were related to the transition to democracy and the rising prominence of the Workers’ Party, and to changes within the transnational religious field in which the diverse institutions of the Catholic Church hold a dominant positionThe analysis finds that the MST’s sustained engagement with the juridical field has set a number of modalities of legal change in motion that redefined important legal terrain on property rights and civil disobedience. It also produced substantial social results. The movement’s ability to convert movement energy into juridical energy, and to mobilise across multiple fields, has played a central role in setting these modalities of legal change in motion.The MST’s juridical mobilisation sheds light on some of the ways in which social movements can use the law to create countervailing possibilities to the particular “liberal” property regime that is being globalised from above. It has played a substantial role in altering a highly exclusionary legality by compelling public authorities to implement existing agrarian reform legislation and by helping to create and institutionalise novel interpretations of the social function of property.