Argentina

Law and society activities in Argentina are still quite underdeveloped, illustrated by the fact that there is no national association of sociolegal scholars. Nevertheless, these activities recently have been growing. In the major public law schools—La Plata, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires—there are at present several teams conducting empirical research on legal issues. The Revista de Sociología del Derecho, founded in the 1980s by a pioneer in the field, Alfredo Ves Losada, is a good place to look for the initial work of these groups.

There is not much sociolegal research in Argentina's social science departments. Excluding their classic concern about crime, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have shown little interest in studying legal issues.

The small community of sociolegal scholars gathers at the Congresos Nacionales de Sociología Jurídica. These conferences, with an attendance of about a hundred people, have been held at La Plata (2000), Córdoba (2001), Buenos Aires (2002), and Tucumán (2003). Books and compact discs, distributed at or after the congresses, offer a good synthesis of present law and society activities in Argentina.

Sociolegal researchers carry out their activities mainly at public universities, with minimal budgets and huge personal effort. Committed to uncovering various forms of inequality and injustice in social life, they tend to concentrate on issues with high political significance, such as access to justice or human rights. María Bergoglio has studied the impact of democratization on litigation. Some have examined the effectiveness of innovations on the process of judicial reform. Felipe Bucito, Carlos Lista, and Ana Brígido have studied legal education.

To understand Argentina's underdevelopment in this area, one should know that sociolegal research generally requires institutional stability. Since transition to democracy started only in 1983, one cannot expect that research connected to the liberal project of social reform through legal means would flourish during periods marked by massive human rights violations.

However, this explanation is not complete. Law schools play a dominant role in shaping legitimate knowledge about law, and in Argentina, many scholars still think of law as only a set of rules or principles and tend to ignore its role as a social institution. Even if some scholars criticize the overemphasis on positive law today, its existence nevertheless has retarded the development of sociolegal research. Fortunately, because many young researchers have grown up under recent democratic governments and are entering the sociolegal field today, we expect promising results in the future.