Abstract
Legal knowledge is a commodity directed by a political economy constituted by precise rules and principles. Examining the political economy of legal knowledge contributes to understanding routine practices that determine ways we create, exchange, and use legal knowledge. This chapter describes a decade’s worth of dynamic programming led by two law schools—Tulane University (New Orleans, USA) and the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia)—to promote joint academic research among scholars across the Americas. It applies conceptual tools to understand practices in legal thought creation and describes how they are typically characterized by a dominant global North partner and a subordinate global South partner. It concludes by offering normative criteria for collaborative processes for legal knowledge construction.
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Notes
- 1.
These philosophical terms, both from the ancient Greek, translate as “imitation” or “reproduction” and “self-design so as to be self-sustaining,” respectively. This conceptual opposition, mimesis/autopoiesis, describes the contents of the colonial legal systems as representations of the legal systems of the metropolis. The mimetic colony is the space where the original knowledge emerging in the autopoietic metropolis is disseminated and applied locally.
- 2.
This field reflects upon the connections and tensions between epistemology and justice. More precisely, it examines the links between knowledge, knowers, and ethics.
- 3.
For the sense in which we use “metropolis” in opposition to “colonial,” see Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska: Lincoln, 2015).
- 4.
The concept of formalist law identifies the legal system with legislation; considers the law to be comprehensive, coherent, and closed; indicates that it alone is able to provide the answers to all problems that arise in a political community; and, in extreme versions, equates formal validity with justice. This concept of law is intertwined with a classical interpretation of liberal democracy that promotes a radical separation of the branches of government.
- 5.
Namely the “social function of property.” In English, see Duguit (1919).
- 6.
In the end, no such contributions were received.
- 7.
The 2016 sponsor, based in the USA, canceled the event due to insufficient US enrollments, which the institution had hoped would underwrite the participation of non-US teams.
- 8.
The Colombian tutela is a writ (a form of legal request) available to citizens to secure fundamental constitutional rights.
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Maldonado, D.B., Crawford, C. (2018). The Political Economy of Legal Knowledge in Action: Collaborative Projects in the Americas. In: Gregorutti, G., Svenson, N. (eds) North-South University Research Partnerships in Latin America and the Caribbean. International and Development Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75364-5_6
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