Interest groups in Brazil: a new era and its challenges

This article provides general and specific insights into Brazil's developing interest group system. In doing so, it presents a theoretical foundation for understanding this group activity, past and present. The general insights of the role of interest groups under limited political participation and authoritarian regimes down to the 1980s plus the period of democracy since then, provide background for the specific insights of the article. The specifics focus on three aspects of Brazil's contemporary interest group activity: (1) utilization of a neo-institutional analytical approach for understanding the interest group environment; (2) an analysis of the types of lobbying activity that takes place in Brazil today, including a case study; and (3) an assessment of the level of development of the group system by placing it in a comparative perspective with both advanced liberal democracies and other Latin American countries. The findings show that Brazil is, indeed, taking on many of the characteristics of a developed interest group system; but its past, its political culture, its political economy, and, paradoxically, its new-found status as an international power, work to present several challenges to its group system and thus to a full democratization of the country. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TMT contracts: Avoiding termination and achieving positive realignment: How legal counsel can make a difference - A UK perspective

“The task of a leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been” Henry A. KissingerWith stuttering growth in the Western economies where major sourcing and TMT (Technology, Media & Telecoms) contracts are pervasive, it is perhaps not surprising that internal and external legal counsel are increasingly being called upon to advise clients on termination options and strategies to effect or oppose a threatened termination for breach of contract. This short paper considers why this has happened and the other factors which are in play which have meant that advice on termination and the renegotiation of contracts in this context has become more common. Expertise in this area is part of an IT lawyer’s tool kit and we consider that this is an area where internal and external legal counsel can make a substantial difference in delivering solutions to their clients.In this paper I talk about termination and renegotiation interchangeably. The reason for this as will become clear is that all forms of termination, whether they are consensual or contested, will involve some form of renegotiation of the terms of the contract between the parties. This is because it is almost impossible except perhaps in the simplest of installations to predict the nature in which a supplier or a customer may wish to change the services provided, and consequently even the most carefully crafted of exit and transition clauses, schedules and plans will require some form of post-contract negotiation between the customer, the outgoing supplier and potentially a new supplier or suppliers. This will necessarily involve some form of renegotiation of the terms of the contract between the parties.This paper looks at renegotiation in the context of a termination scenario rather than dealing with renegotiation during the normal course of operation of the contract.