Colombia

Law and society activities in Colombia emerged in the 1970s and have experienced a boom since the 1990s. They involve numerous university research centers, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and cover topics such as administration of justice, the legal profession, law and political violence, human rights, and legal pluralism.

Since the 1980s, three developments have converged to spur the growth of empirically grounded, interdisciplinary studies of law. Before then, the grip that legal formalism and abstract theorizing had traditionally held over legal education and practice discouraged them. First, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alternative legal services organizations, notably the Instituto Latinoamericano de Servicios Legales Alternativos (ILSA), were established that combined advocacy and sociolegal research.

Second, as elsewhere in Latin America, the first wave of law and development programs promoted diagnostic sociolegal studies as a preliminary step toward the reform of legal institutions. Participants in law and development and alternative legal services initiatives collaborated closely and produced some of the pioneering sociolegal studies of the legal profession, popular legal services, and labor law. Third, the rise of an antiformalist movement within legal academia in the early 1990s, so-called new law (nuevo derecho), and the concomitant adoption of a new constitution in 1991 that was heavily influenced by such a movement created the requisite intellectual and political conditions for law and society activities to prosper.

The turning point in the consolidation of sociolegal research and the entrance of Colombia into international networks of law and society activities was an ambitious study, directed by Boaventura Santos and Mauricio García-Villegas. Drawing on international law and society literature, the study documented both official mechanisms of dispute resolution, such as civil and labor courts, and nonofficial ones, such as those used by indigenous communities and by guerrilla groups in the territories they controlled.

Today, the leading actors in the sociolegal field include pioneers, such as ILSA, and newer research centers, such as the Centro de Estudios de Derecho, Justicia y Sociedad (Dejusticia, Center for Studies on Law, Justice, and Societ y), as well as the Universities of Nacional, Los Andes, and Externado. Given the position of these and similar organizations in international sociolegal networks, cutting-edge topics in Colombian research agendas today have affinities with those that are salient elsewhere. For instance, the debate between law and economics and sociolegal approaches to the study of institutions has become pointed and will figure prominently in the future. Together with the continuing study of classic sociolegal topics, such as the legal profession, and issues specific to the Colombian social and political context, such as the effects of civil war on the legal field, new debates will likely consolidate Colombia as one of the countries at the forefront of law and society activities in Latin America.