Twelve legal scholars, six of them from Brazil, lucidly analyze the slow decomposition of Brazil's military authoritarian regime in the early 1980s and the uncertain emergence of a still incomplete democratizing alternative, fraught with profound economic and political problems. Of particular interest are well-documented studies by four U.S. scholars of the church, grass-roots popular movements, women's groups and labor unions, as well as two provocative essays by Brazilian scholar-politicians Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Francisco Weffort. An important benchmark study.