Like many countries, Chile’s legal system is rooted in a formalist tradition—one that emphasizes strict adherence to codes, rules, and the ideal of objectivity. This approach continues to shape legal education and professional practice across the country. But for João Vitor Cardoso, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Chile, its rigidity left little room for critical inquiry or imagination. “It was fundamentally based on analytical philosophy,” he recalled. So, undertaking a Ph.D. in law could be regarded as a profoundly frustrating experience for someone with a sociolegal mindset.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chilean scholars mounted the first real challenge to this dominant legal culture by developing a rich tradition of law and society scholarship. Unsurprisingly, domestic institutions were resistant to this challenge, forcing researchers to work with foreign partners like Stanford University. Their work came to a complete halt when Augusto Pinochet rose to power in 1973—but not before elements of their thinking were co-opted. Pinochet’s regime leveraged sociolegal beliefs like legal instrumentalism to help entrench neoliberal capitalism in the country.
“The Chilean case is a great example of how we can also get unintended consequences from the law and development movement, when these efforts are abstracted from local knowledge, local power battles, local power wars,” said Cardoso, now an Associate Professor at Santo Tomas University in Temuco, Chile. “Many of these scholars couldn’t maintain their research agenda under the dictatorship…many were exiled, and they were unable to foster the field from abroad.”
Pinochet’s regime largely succeeded in thwarting sociolegal scholarship, leaving much of the movement’s discourse lost to history. Yet more than fifty years later, the appetite for understanding law’s human impact has not faded.
Professor Cardoso is one of many scholars in Chile pushing for the field’s redevelopment. Originally from Brazil, he studied sociology in undergrad before pivoting to law, eventually obtaining his master’s degree in social science at the University of Sao Paulo (FFLCH-USP). This trajectory trained Cardoso to understand law through a more sociological lens—and to find his experience as a doctoral candidate at the University of Chile’s law department to be less than inspiring.
Cardoso discovered that he wasn’t alone in his frustration. After participating in a panel discussion, he found himself sitting next to Salvador Millaleo, a professor at the University of Chile (Santiago). They connected over their shared interest in legal pluralism and Latin American indigenous rights. “[It] quickly turned into the beginning of a very great friendship, which became a rich intellectual connection,” Cardoso recalled.
Their connection deepened at the Chilean Constitutional Convention in 2021-2022. Millaleo was presenting to indigenous representatives at the Convention, while Cardoso was working as an ethnographer for his dissertation.
“Salvador was like the main voice in Chile supporting the creation of a plurinational state,” Cardoso said with admiration.
Millaleo connected Cardoso with many of the key individuals he needed to enhance his research, essentially becoming his “de facto thesis advisor.” Although their proposed Constitutional amendments ultimately failed, Millaleo and Cardoso were becoming a formidable duo, jointly determined to continue their opposition to Chile’s legal orthodoxy by reviving the long dormant law and society movement through the lens of global legal pluralism.
This undertaking has both a social and scholarly component as it connects scholars across the country while also reviving and building upon work from the past. The Annual Congress of the Chilean Community of Sociolegal Research, started in 2018, has been a critical first step in uniting contemporary scholars. Despite the relative dearth of written or recorded material, this initiative has advanced due to help from surviving members of the original movement
“They are retired, but they are still alive,” Millaleo says. “Our objective is to recover the oral memories about this time.”
Millaleo and Cardoso were already discussing ways to preserve this history in an article or book when they encountered the LSA Programming Grant call for proposals. Meeting over another fateful lunch, the two mapped out their idea in one sitting: a mentorship program that would bring scholars from northern and southern Chile together to share knowledge about their lost sociolegal history.
With their proposal awarded, they created an eight-week workshop series on law and society topics hosted jointly by the University of Chile, Santiago and Santo Tomás University, Temuco – in both hybrid and in-person formats. Participants came from across Chile and beyond, including Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, China, and the United States. Collectively, they brought backgrounds in criminology, psychology, geography, and anthropology. Over the course of the workshops, they explored topics like constitutional ethnography, legal imperialism, gender and law, legal culture, semiotics, law and the arts, the genealogy of law and society in Chile, and global legal pluralism.
The sessions made a strong impression on attendees. In southern Chile, some students had never heard spoken English or met an “intellectual” in person. Others, including a master’s student in the north, were surprised to learn that Chile even had a law and society tradition. One student entered the program as a right-wing supporter of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
“We had this session on indigenous rights from a very progressive anthropologist,” Cardoso recalled. “And that transformed my student…he was like, ‘I just want to thank you, I never thought about any of these subjects we’re discussing.’”
Cardoso was also struck by the students’ enthusiasm after the workshop ended.
“Some [students] emailed me asking whether the program would still endure,” he said, “And some offered to be an assistant and help in the organization of future workshops. That was a very great surprise.”
Energized by the successful workshops, Millaleo and Cardoso are excitedly planning their next steps. They intend to repeat the program with refinements based on their initial experiences. To avoid bureaucratic delays, the pair hope to partner with external organizations for support. They also plan to update some of the subject matter.
“Right now, we know that people in southern Chile want to study indigenous rights,” Cardoso noted. “No bioconstitutionalism, you know, they are not interested in that.”
The pair also intend to write an article compiling lessons from the workshops, which they plan to publish as an e-book, and potentially a special issue of a Chilean journal such as Derecho y Crítica Social. Their ultimate goal is to establish a Chilean Law and Society Association, which they hope will make it easier to attract funding and support from many different universities.
“The dictatorship broke this development, but the memory remains” says Millaleo. “So that is the basis of these efforts in the new century, to resume this work.”
To view some of the recorded lectures and learn more about Chilean law and society efforts, check out The Chilean Law & Society Program on YouTube and @programaderechoysociedad on Instagram.