Unger Leaves Harvard For Brazilian Government

One of Harvard Law School’s most well-known professors has taken a leave of absence to join the government of leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva.

Pound Professor of Law Roberto M. Unger, a Brazilian by birth, left Cambridge for Brasilia last week to enter the famously rough-and-tumble world of Brazilian politics. Unger officially assumed the title of Secretary of Long Term Planning last Tuesday.

“This is really the first time that he’s getting this close to actual policy,” said Hariri Professor of International Political Economy Dani Rodrik ’79, who has taught alongside Unger at the Kennedy School. “He’s been involved in politics on and off in Brazil for sometime…but this is obviously a tremendous chance for him to actually be in a position where he can actually get things done.”

Though this is his first ministerial position, Unger is no newcomer to policy adivising in Brazil, according to Ricardo Reisen de Pinho, a senior researcher at Harvard Business School’s Latin America Research Center, which is based in Buenos Aires. Reisen de Pinho said in an e-mailed statement that “Unger has been a close adviser [to] several controversial Brazilian politicians” and has devised “innovative political ideas for the country” in the past.

Among the reforms Unger, who declined to comment for this story, has proposed in the past are the levying of a value-added tax on purchases to broaden the nation’s tax base, making education and employment legal rights, and creating a governmental agency devoted to destabilizing entrenched interests.

In legal circles, Unger is best known for his integral role in the development of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), an influential and very controversial movement in legal theory that argues that existing legal frameworks are grounded in socioeconomic inequity rather than neutral principles.

Cromwell Professor of Law Mark V. Tushnet ’67, who is also regarded as a leading figure in the CLS movement, said in an interview that Unger was a “central” figure in developing the movement’s theory, and that “very early on he...described a number of important aspects of Critical Legal Studies and captured in very important ways what the enterprise was about.”

“On the academic policy side, [CLS] was very contentious—people regarded proponents of critical legal studies as anti-law in some sense,” Tushnet said. “There were cultural differences between the younger generation attracted to Critical Legal Studies and the older generation that found it unsettling.”

The movement garnered considerable attention during the 1980s at Harvard, principally because of pitched battles between critical theorists and more conservative law professors over faculty appointments and tenuring decisions. Paul M. Bator, a law professor at the time who has since left Harvard, told The New York Times in over two decades ago that CLS had had “an absolutely disastrous effect on the intellectual and institutional life” at the Law School.

Just how strongly Unger’s theories will affect his actions in government is unclear, though he has already taken flack for accepting the post in the first place, with some critics accusing him of compromising his principles.

Over the past few years, Unger has attacked Lula’s government for its recurring corruption scandals. He has gone so far as to describe the administration as “the most corrupt in Brazilian history,” calling for the president’s impeachment in a 2005 editorial in Folha de S. Paulo, a Portuguese-language daily often regarded as Brazil’s newspaper-of-record.

After taking the position with Lula’s government, Unger retracted these criticisms, writing again in Folha de S. Paulo, “I was wrong. The facts demonstrated that the president had no direct or indirect involvement in those episodes.”

Unger also removed the first editorial from his Harvard Web site, another Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, recently reported.

Lula and Unger were also recently at odds over a legal claim Unger made in the U.S. in which he sought “close to $2 million against some pension funds controlled by Brazilian state-owned companies,” according to Reisen de Pinho. The suit prompted speculation in the Brazilian media that Unger might not assume his post, but he was inaugurated last week despite what seems to be a rocky relationship with Lula.

Given Unger’s sharp pen and academic background, some professors wonder whether he will be able to make any headway on pushing through reforms in Brasilia.

“I’m not sure with the way Brazilian politics is organized whether he’ll be effective or not,” said Rodrik. “But I do know that he couldn’t resist taking the job regardless of the risks.”

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.