ABSTRACT
Latin America After the collapse of the extreme variants of inquisition-process in the period 19452000, the way was now clear for a new global resurgence in adversariality. Driven forward by US hegemony in law and practice (Mattei 2003; Langer 2004), as well as the pervasive ideological influence symbolised by the Hollywood courtroom drama (Machura and Ulbrich 2001), this revolution has been likened, in its universality, to the reception of Roman law in the European ius commune period (Weigand 1991). Three distinct waves of reform can be identified. The first, which will be discussed in this chapter, has taken place progressively since 1945 in the western European countries which had originally embraced Napoleon’s Code d’Instruction Criminelle (CIC). The second, more recent in origin, is currently under way amongst the highly authoritarian justice systems of Latin America. Finally, a third wave, which forms the subject of the following chapter, has since 1989 affected the countries which adopted ‘socialist legality’. This is not to say that the adversarial revolution has been confined to these areas. On the contrary, its impact is truly global, but the countries of Europe and Latin America may be taken as representative examples of the transformation.
