Coordinators: Diogo Rosenthal Coutinho (University of Sao Paulo Law School), Matías Guiloff (Diego Portales University Law School)
260429_final_programme_v5.pdfDescription of the meeting
In this workshop we intend to explore research agendas that can inform sociolegal studies. Sociolegal studies reject formalistic and conservative ideas about law. It is an approach that is thus heterodox in the sense that it opposes a mainstream theoretical and ideological consensus that has ultimately sustained and reproduced capitalism. Based on the assumption that sociolegal studies can benefit from their cross-fertilization, the proposed workshop gathers scholars who, through the use of interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies, have worked in three specific research agendas: legal realism, institutionalism and democratic experimentalism. The premise is that their discussion can serve as common reference point, or shared unit of analysis, and foster a promising dialogue between the workshop's participants. Legal realism played an important role in incepting a more functional and critical perspective to legal analysis. Such a stance is also promoted by institutionalism, which, as realism, understands the legal system as shaped by political and power relations. Institutionalism, moreover, claims that as the ‘stuff’ of society, institutions are par excellence embedded in society - they underpin economic and legal relations and transactions, embody and reflect economic motivations, and are formatted by legal rules and processes. In turn, as institutional arrangements economic and legal structures constitute political environments, economic policies, and constitutional and regulatory regimes. Democratic experimentalism, further, claims that the existing democratic practices are no longer apt enough to handle the most crucial and political problems. It underscores the need for relying on organizational models and procedural approaches that can favor the handling of such problems. Nonetheless, both in academia and among policymakers, more limited forms of institutional analysis, such as new institutional economics with its rational-choice underpinnings and an unrealistic and de-politicized institutional legal analysis still prevail. Orthodox economic and legal theories are constitutive for the existing economic system, and perpetuate the status quo. How can critical scholars align to bridge the epistemological gap that lead most economists to conceive of institutions either as neutral frameworks or regulatory constraints (rather than constitutive and enabling), and most lawyers to view them as unquestionable givens (rather than the outcome of economic and political co- evolution)? How can sociologists and lawyers bring the analysis of the origin and construction, development and change of institutions to bear in a context in which the political economy behind the market system and its underlying legal rules deserves to be taken seriously?
Our experience in Oñati
Organizing a seminar at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law is an experience I wholeheartedly recommend to every scholar committed to the socio-legal research agenda. For decades, the Institute has stood as a true benchmark in the field — its reputation well-earned, its location breathtaking, its infrastructure excellent, and its staff both welcoming and remarkably efficient.
My colleague Matias Guiloff and I were fortunate to live this firsthand. The days we spent at Oñati were intellectually rich and genuinely memorable: stimulating discussions, meaningful connections, seeds of new research projects, and, perhaps most valuably, friendships that will last well beyond the seminar itself.
We leave deeply grateful — and with the sincere wish that Oñati continues to thrive for many decades to come. Diogo R. Coutinho, University of São Paulo, Brazil
