Exploring the historical experience of the Global South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that state law excludes populations and peoples by deeming them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. Demonstrating the suffering caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, he pursues real legal utopias by proposing realistic yet hopeful alternatives.

Ruiz-Tagle provides a comparative reconstruction of the ideological and institutional history of Chile's constitutional law. Drawing on concepts and theoretical developments from western constitutional theory, history, comparative analysis, and political philosophy, he explains how political and ideological battles have shaped Chilean history.

Irene van Oorschot takes the reader on an ethnographic journey through judicial and social-scientific ways of seeing the world, showing how judges and researchers, case files and research methods, theories and narratives become implicated with each other to produce different understandings of the world.