24.06.2025 – 18:00 Uhr
International Development and Comparative Law in the Americas during the Cold War
Vortrag von Prof. Andrés Jiménez (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá)
Raum UH-118
In the 1960s and 1970s, different public and private institutions in the United States invested considerable human and financial resources in technical assistance programs aimed at modernizing the legal systems of Latin America according to the American model, in order to remove those obstacles to development attributed to outdated legal structures and obsolete legal education. In the assessment of the American experts, the inadequacy of Latin American legal systems was due in large part to formalism and legalism. Lawyers were associated with national elites, heirs of the privileges of colonial jurists, and seen as preservers of the status quo. Law faculties were considered elitist institutions that contributed to the reproduction of social hierarchies and the transmission of the cultural patterns that reinforced them. The theoretical foundations of these “Law and development” projects are usually associated to the tradition of legal realism and modernization theory that had been dominant in American social science since the late 1950s. There was a third theoretical influence that, in my opinion, has not been adequately addressed in the existing literature on the “Law and development” movement: comparative law. In my presentation I will focus on how the latter was articulated with modernization theory and legal realism in the conception of “Law and development” programs for Latin America. In particular, I will examine the characterization of the region's legal systems and their comparison to U.S. law.