Special workshop proposal in Spanish language.
The importance of Legal Reasoning for deliberative democracy and the possibilities of justice: a view from Latin America.
It is often stated that modern democracy is participatory, representative and deliberative, but we suspect that the real democracies we know have little of these three characteristics. Participation is declining, representatives are discredited and deliberation seems to be very weakened in the different places where democracy operates as a form of government, especially in Latin America. So much so that today we hear talk of democratic yawning, of a democracy that is increasingly apathetic and dull, except for the occasions when citizens become indignant with their representatives and protest peacefully.
We could be in the presence of a total, definitive, global crisis and not just a phase of limited instability that would affect one or another of the current democracies.
The objectives of this special group proposal in Spanish language, are the following:
1. Analyze the new challenges for democracy, coming from the development of artificial intelligence, climate change and migratory processes, especially in Latin America.
2. Determine the role that legal reasoning can play in strengthening democracy, preventing corruption, and legitimizing and controlling political power, particularly in Latin American countries.
3. Identify how the administration of justice and the exercise of legal professions affect the functioning of democratic regimes and the rest of their institutions.
4. Reflect on the innovations that need to be implemented in the field of legal education and the training of lawyers and judges, to adequately respond to the problems of current democracies, specifically in Latin America.
Although the Philosophy of Law presents important margins of indeterminacy regarding the problems that concern it, regarding the answers it offers to those problems and regarding the method it uses, there is a relative consensus that it seeks to respond, among others, to the question that asks about what norms the law should adopt or establish. Thus, the specific subject of the philosophy of law, as proposed by Hans Kelsen, is the problem of justice, and insofar as justice is a postulate of morality, that is, an imperative of an ethical order, the philosophy of law constitutes a branch of moral philosophy. As Norberto Bobbio adds, the philosophy of law allows the agents of dogmatic knowledge of law to take note of the “cultural matrices” of the respective legal system, thus making them “more sensitive to the understanding of the different ideological conditioning of the legal system that they must interpret”. We are probably witnessing today in Latin America the eternal return of one of the oldest questions in philosophy: how do we build a more just society?
As Dworkin says regarding what he calls “the dreams of law,” there is always a pressure of law beyond law, a challenge to the law of today with the possibilities of the law of tomorrow, so that every time the legislator votes on a law or every time a judge decides a difficult case, just as every time the opinion of a jurist or a legal philosopher influences one or another of those authorities, what we are witnessing is a vote. in favor of some of the dreams of law.
Legal philosophers are especially interested in drawing attention to how law can develop in the direction of justice. This is, of course, a direction that not everyone will share, although the different programs that legal philosophers can offer in this regard will in one way or another take hold of those who have the responsibility of producing law, so that progress of this can be more deliberate, reflective and timely.
The dreams of legal philosophers - as Dworkin points out - are competitive dreams, because the visions are different and because there is no alternative but to make elections. But those dreams make legal philosophers authentic “chain novelists with epics in their minds and who imagine that their work unfolds through volumes that can take generations to be written.” In this sense, “each of their dreams is already latent in current law.”
This is the framework of this workshop proposal: what are the “dreams of law” that are in competition in Latin America today, based on the current situation of our societies and political regimes?