This article analyzes the processes shaping the emergence of a professionalized legal academia in Chile. Through a case study informed by quantitative and qualitative evidence, the study shows that the control and orientation of a professional school is a contested space, where the interactions between the profession, the market, and the state shape the trajectory of the legal education field. The article argues that the neoliberal remaking of higher education of the 1980s created a regime that increasingly relies on performance indicators modeled on the paradigm of the research university, which have been used as an opportunity by law schools seeking elite status to increase their academic reputation through the formation of bodies of full-time legal scholars. This new institutional environment has produced, however, an important degree of malaise among the new professional legal academics, the majority of whom resent that their research is increasingly swayed by the standards imposed by governmental or university-wide bureaucratic structures rather than by the needs of legal practice.
Los principales esfuerzos que se han hecho por examinar la cuestión de la legitimidad de la Constitución y la necesidad de cambio constitucional están atados a una concepción soberanista o revolucionaria del poder constituyente que resulta inadecuada para el caso chileno. Esta forma de entender la cuestión constitucional ha llevado a que el debate sea presa tanto de una exagerada fijación con la herencia política y económica de la dictadura, como de un excesivo localismo que, al sobredimensionar las particularidades del caso chileno, impide apreciar sus afinidades con fenómenos más extendidos y mejor estudiados. El abandono de esta concepción del poder constituyente es, así, un primer paso para entender mejor el carácter de la así llamada ‘crisis constitucional’ y del proceso de cambio constitucional que Chile enfrenta. Es más, como se muestra en este artículo, el concepto de descomposición constitucional ofrece una perspectiva más apropiada para entender y discutir la experiencia constitucional chilena.
The Cosmopolitan Constitutionis an intriguing and puzzling book. In particular, the book has the uncanny ability to render fresh what is for the constitutional theorist familiar territory such as the debate on judicial supremacy and the counter-majoritarian difficulty, the expansion of the proportionality principle, etc. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of its overarching argument is that given our present conditions—such as those of the cosmopolitan constitution or constitutionalism 3.0—we should be increasingly plagued by self-doubt, at least to the extent that we are to remain committed to the tenets that once animated our constitutional traditions. This implies that the partial sense of disorientation with which one is left after reading the book is deliberately provoked precisely because of the main insights it has to offer.
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