ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that as long as the rule of law was even nominally present, the greatest strength would be to remain scrupulously legal, while exploiting the formal system to find loopholes or to expose and ridicule the authorities. The slogans were literally destructive: deinstitutionalization, decarceration, deprofessionalization, delegalization, demedicalization, antipsychiatry, decentralization, deformalization, decriminalization, and so on. And when all those walls began to crumble, so new, looser, and so much nicer arrangements would be set up: community control, informalism, neighborhood justice, mediation, self-help, the culture of civility. The argument is illustrated by two forms of legal struggles: for the redefini-tion of criminal justice, and for the right to decent housing. In the first form the "leading case" is Jose Diogo, a poor rural worker arrested by the G. N. R. for having stabbed a rich landowner.
