Kellogg Visiting Fellow Sandra Botero has garnered an honorable mention for the 2024 Donna Lee Van Cott Best Book Award for her book Courts that Matter (Cambridge University Press).
The Donna Lee Van Cott Best Book Award is presented by the Political Institutions section of the Latin American Studies Association, recognizing books that make significant contributions in the area of political institutions.
The book asks whether courts can advance socioeconomic rights and uses a rigorous comparative study of the impact of socioeconomic rights rulings in Colombia and Argentina to address the question. The book includes case studies of landmark rulings on environmental, health, housing, and other socioeconomic rights and charts pathways for broader applicability through comparison with rulings by the Indian Supreme Court.
The LASA citation shares that the book builds "a nuanced and creative argument of the drivers of judicial impact that focuses not only on what happens inside the court (i.e. monitoring mechanisms) but also what happens outside of it (i.e. legal constituencies)." It states further, "Botero’s conceptual and methodological precision is also particularly impressive—her book is a masterclass on research design."
A former Kellogg PhD Fellow, Botero is an associate professor in the School of International Political and Urban Studies at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. Her broader research agenda studies the relationship between the judiciary and democracy, as well as electoral behavior, with a regional focus on Latin America.