Teaching

Legal regulation is everywhere in the contemporary world: from fundamental rights of association to parking rules, from the administrative organization of the police to the definition of electoral crimes, from restrictions on fishing practices to the allocation of responsibility in derivatives trading. Our societies would be unrecognizable without the legal form and legal authority. Yet the law can paradoxically also feel distant, even inconsequential, in everyday life. The powerful, and even the powerless, often have no difficulty skirting regulations. Going to court is resource-consuming, and most do not pursue litigation even when they could. Bureaucrats frequently appear to act more out of their personal sense of morality than attachment to the letter of the law. The list goes on. Clearly, society’s problems cannot be solved by legal codes alone, no matter how well-drafted.

How, then, can we make sense of law’s simultaneous centrality and marginality in social life? No one can offer a singular answer to this question. Instead, this course aims to equip students with the tools for asking sharper questions about how law operates in, shapes, and is shaped by society – and for using theory to generate their own interpretations. We begin by assuming that law matters and examine the diverse ways legal ordering structures social interaction across contexts. We then turn to the barriers and transformations that rules “in the books” undergo as they move into practice, highlighting how law’s institutional nature makes ongoing background work indispensable to its structural force. Finally, we turn to actors with a special role in the legal world, such as judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers, asking how they construct the legitimacy to speak in the name of law and how their behavior shapes legal ordering.

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This course uses labor regulation as a lens to explore the explanatory logics of theories of economic regulation (in a broad sense, beyond regulatory law). As in other areas of economic activity, policies related to the world of work mobilize organized interests operating over longer horizons than electoral ones. Thus, we can rarely explain why a given rule takes one form and not another without reference to the interactions between these groups. The different aspects of labor regulation, from pension reforms to the structure of collective bargaining, provide a valuable entry point for observing such interactions insofar as they consistently involve variations of the same types of interest – State, business and labor.

However, theories often offer divergent answers from apparently incompatible vocabularies: the same wage policy, for example, can be explained as the imposition of union coalitions or as a cooperative game with the government to stabilize prices. The aim of the course is to provide students with the tools to deal with the existing theoretical variety in such a way that they can give equal consideration to all plausible hypotheses to explain their phenomena of interest. To this end, we will structure our discussions using the canonical differentiation between types of causal mechanisms: those of rational cooperation, cultural consensus, and power relations.

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This course offers an introduction to qualitative research design for descriptive and causal inference. A fundamental challenge of any research is that we never have access to all the relevant information in the universe of cases to which our questions may apply. For example, we may be interested in the conditions under which countries in economic crisis adopt a certain reform instead of plausible alternatives, but there is no way of directly observing each decision-making process, let alone the motivations of those involved. Therefore, we have no choice but to use logical criteria to formulate answers from limited evidence - in other words, to make inferences. The way in which we operationalize these criteria in structuring our investigations is called "research design".

The last few decades have brought enormous advances in terms of formalizing the logical criteria underlying qualitative inferences, making it possible to elucidate old practices and develop new techniques. While these advances have multiplied the options available to the academic community, they have also raised expectations of rigor and methodological self-awareness. Challenges include conceptualization and measurement, the identification of causal regularities, and the specification of processes linking explanatory conditions and outcomes. To face such challenges, the ability to identify and handle strategies useful to our research problems - including, for example, process tracing, configurational analysis, and the controlled construction of counterfactuals - becomes increasingly necessary.

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Teaching assistant for Prof. Fernando Menezes

Teaching assistant for Prof. Diogo R. Coutinho