Popular Advocacy in the 21 st Century

Abstract

The article analyzes the changes needed in the law to include the sectors excluded from modernity: peoples, women and nature. It verifies that legal changes are necessary to include rights, but that they are not sufficient, since legislation may become ineffectual in practice. So, the struggle continues to implement the rights enshrined. This requires theoretical and argumentative grounding by competent professionals, trained in the schools of the system, but with a critical sense and a popular perspective. It analyses popular advocacy since the 19th century and its major transformation at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century with the organization of excluded sectors, such as women, indigenous people and quilombolas 1 . It shows how there has been a growth in the number of professionals and the formulation of critical and insurgent legal theories capable of underpinning changes and disputing concepts and decisions. It reveals the importance of social organizations and the presence of popular advocacy, as well as the importance of public training policies, such as PRONERA 2 law courses. It shows that grassroots advocacy made up of well-prepared lawyers has been fundamental to legal disputes and that the trend is to improve this participation more and more.