Books by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
Resumen:
En este libro se busca romper el mito –muy afincado en la historiografía chilena– que l... more Resumen:
En este libro se busca romper el mito –muy afincado en la historiografía chilena– que le asigna al Estado Docente decimonónico un rol determinante en la creación y surgimiento de la clase media chilena y cuestiona, de paso, la idea de una temprana movilidad social en Chile promovida por el sistema de educación pública.
A partir de una reinterpretación de la historiografía sobre los sectores populares en Chile, la autora visibiliza la existencia de una clase media de rasgos empresariales presente ya a inicios de la República, la que estaba conformada por artesanos, comerciantes, mineros y propietarios rurales. Demuestra que fueron estos sectores, y no las clases populares –como se cree–, los que se insertaron en el sistema educacional público. Estos sectores empresariales de clase media que accedieron al Liceo, y en menor medida a la Universidad, habrían sido los principales integrantes de los grupos de intelectuales, empleados públicos y privados que irrumpieron en la escena política a principios del siglo XX.
Así, al preguntarse por los orígenes, las características y la evolución de la clase media chilena, este libro trata de poner en perspectiva histórica un debate actual: el rol de la educación como base de la promoción social y las formas de reproducción de las desigualdades sociales en Chile.
Abstract:
This book challenges the well-settled idea in traditional Chilean historiography that considers the public education system as the place where the Chilean middle class was forged, and through this hypothesis, it confronts the notion of the public education as a vehicle of social mobility.
Reinterpreting the notion of “popular classes” in the 19th century Chile, the author posits the existence of an early middle class group of producers and merchants, showing how they were able to build social networks, how they gained access to the dominant culture and to the recognition of their social status. These elements were crucial to allow their integration in the public education system. On the contrary, this integration was not possible for the popular sectors: through several mechanisms, they were systematically excluded.
However, for the middle class groups, the access to formal education deeply changed their identity: from being independent producers, they were transformed into public officials, private employees and intellectuals. This group was the one able to gain a relevant position in the public debate since the 1920s.
In this way, this book throws some historical perspective on a current debate: the capacity of public education in promoting social mobility, and the role of state institutions in reproducing social inequalities.
Este informe recoge los resultados y conclusiones de la tercera reunión regional de especialistas... more Este informe recoge los resultados y conclusiones de la tercera reunión regional de especialistas sobre Transparencia, Lucha contra la Corrupción y el Sistema Interamericano de Derechos Humanos. Esta reunión se desarrolló en Santiago de Chile los días 7 y 8 de noviembre de 2011.
En este tercer encuentro, se abordó la conexión entre los derechos humanos y la transparencia y lucha contra la corrupción, centrándose específicamente en la utilización de las herramientas del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos para la promoción de ambas agendas.
Este trabajo tuvo por objeto identificar las principales políticas públicas de búsqueda de la ver... more Este trabajo tuvo por objeto identificar las principales políticas públicas de búsqueda de la verdad y memorias referidas a las violaciones de derechos humanos ocurridas durante las dictaduras o los conflictos armados internos en 7 países de la región: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Perú y Uruguay. Se relevaron políticas públicas de verdad y memorias a nivel nacional, regional y local, que se hubieran generado a partir de la transición a la democracia en cada país hasta diciembre de 2009.
Papers by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
Journal of Law and Society
CEP Puntos de Referencia N° 604, 2022
La función jurisdiccional fue una de las materias de las primeras normas aprobadas por el Pleno d... more La función jurisdiccional fue una de las materias de las primeras normas aprobadas por el Pleno de la Convención Constitucional. Entre dichas normas, hay algunas califican el modo en que deberá ejercerse jurisdicción. Por ejemplo, se dispone que los tribunales, cualquiera sea su competencia, deben resolver con enfoque de género. Asimismo, se deben velar por la tutela y promoción de los derechos humanos y de la naturaleza, del sistema democrático y el principio de juridicidad. También deben observarse los principios de plurinacionalidad, pluralismo jurídico e interculturalidad. El CEP invitó Marianne González, profesora universitaria, y a María Eugenia Sandoval, abogada con una valiosa experiencia en la judicatura, a reflexionar sobre las características y posibles consecuencias de estas normas que ingresaron al borrador de nueva Constitución. Marianne González enfoca la cuestión desde una perspectiva que combina continuidad y cambio. Llega a la conclusión que en dichas normas hay mucho de continuidad, pues son el resultado de procesos que ya venían desarrollándose hace tiempo. María Eugenia Sandoval, por su parte, concuerda en que algo de continuidad hay en estas normas acordadas por la Convención Constitucional, especialmente en materia de género. Pero advierte sobre los problemas que, por la forma en que quedaron redactadas, podrían dichas normas-y otras del borrador-plantear al ejercicio de la jurisdicción.
Law & Social Inquiry, 2016
This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judici... more This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the “social question”—the concern for improving the lower…
American Journal of Legal History, 2021
This article studies how the organized Chilean legal profession responded to political repression... more This article studies how the organized Chilean legal profession responded to political repression between the 1920s and the 1950s. The research shows that, threatened by partisan politics, the Chilean Bar Association came to define itself as an "apolitical" and purely professional organization in order to ensure the cohesion of the guild. The elitist and mostly rightwing leadership of the Bar was reluctant to engage publicly in any politically-tainted action, including the defense of the victims of political persecution. Nevertheless, the pressure of its constituency to uphold the principle of professional solidarity forced the Bar to privately intercede in favor of politically persecuted lawyers, including Communist lawyers targeted during the early Cold War years. Still, in order to justify this intervention, both the Bar leadership and the Communist lawyers seeking the Bar's protection framed their discourse in the narrow framework of the professional rights of lawyers, discarding a broader action in favor of the civil and political rights of the general citizenry. Therefore, in mid-twentieth-century Chile, the impossible project to transcend partisan politics through the discourse of apolitical legal professionalism curtailed rather buttressed the defense of rights and liberties. By exploring the complex relationship between lawyers and politics through the prism of the Chilean Bar Association, this piece contributes to the social and cultural history of lawyers in Latin America, to the broader sociological and historical debates on the relationship between lawyers and political liberalism, and to the history of human rights.
Historia (Santiago), 2021
Este artículo muestra que la creación del Colegio de Abogados de Chile en 1925 fue una de las res... more Este artículo muestra que la creación del Colegio de Abogados de Chile en 1925 fue una de las respuestas institucionales de la élite jurídica frente a la percepción de crisis de su profesión. Esta supuesta crisis era el reflejo de una etapa transicional de profesionalización de la abogacía, caracterizada por su incipiente democratización, lo que generó tensiones entre los abogados tradicionales y los nuevos profesionales de clase media. Entre 1900 y 1920, estas tensiones se expresaron en discursos sobre la amenaza de los tinterillos y la corrupción y politización del Poder Judicial. El quiebre institucional de 1925 permitió conjurar este trance mediante la creación del Colegio de Abogados, cuyo diseño permitió a la élite jurídica culminar su proyecto de profesionalización y asegurar su control sobre un diversificado gremio.
Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 2022
El objetivo de este número especial es mostrar el trabajo que está realizando una nueva generac... more El objetivo de este número especial es mostrar el trabajo que está realizando una nueva generación de personas dedicadas a los estudios de Derecho y Sociedad en Chile. Este grupo interdisciplinario se ha venido congregando desde mediados de la década del 2010s, tomando realidad formal el año 2018 con la formación del Grupo de Derecho y Sociedad de Chile. Considerando la historia de los estudios socio-legales en Chile, se muestran las continuidades y rupturas que ha experimentado este campo de investigación desde los inicios del siglo XX hasta el presente. En este número especial se presentan las innovadoras perspectivas metodológicas y teóricas desarrolladas en la última década, las que invitan a repensar al derecho en su constitutiva paradoja: como reproductor de la desigualdad estructural y como herramienta de transformación social.
This special issue shows the scholarship developed by a new generation of people dedicated to Socio-Legal Studies in Chile. Our interdisciplinary group has been gathering since the mid-2010s and got formalized in 2018 as the Chilean Law and Society Group. The history of socio-legal studies in Chile shows continuities and ruptures from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. In this special issue, each article offers innovative methodological and theoretical perspectives developed in the last decade in the Socio-Legal field in Chile. At its core, this special issue rethinks law as both a reproducer of structural inequality and as a tool for social transformation.
This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judici... more This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the " social question " —the concern for improving the lower classes' working and living conditions to promote the nation's modernization and prevent political radicalization— the Chilean legal profession committed to legal aid reform to escape a professional identity crisis. Legal aid allowed lawyers to claim they had a new " social function " advocating on behalf of the poor. However, within legal aid offices, lawyers interacted with female social workers who acted as gatekeepers, mediators, and translators between the lawyers and the poor. This gendered professional complementarity in legal aid offices helped lawyers to put limits on their new " social function " : it allowed them to maintain legal aid as a part-time activity that did not challenge the structure of the legal system as a whole.
This article deals with the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service from its creation in 1932 un... more This article deals with the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service from its creation in 1932 until the 1960s, the institution that served as the main legal intermediary between the lower classes and the justice system. By focusing on how the Legal Aid ServiceÕs professional staffÑlawyers and social workersÑused this institution to define their professional identity, and on how they conceived of their role as mediators, I argue that this institution promoted a system of legal intermediation that privileged conciliation over contentious litigation, and that it worked as a multiple-layered screen between popular demands and the justice system. This reveals why, in comparison to the progressive inclusion of the poor in new welfare state agencies in mid-twentieth century Chile, the judicial system appeared as a conservative and exclusionary force: legal aid had precisely for purpose that the most radical demands could not reach the courts.
Interview to Steve J. Stern about memory, history and human rights in Chile
Este artículo presenta un análisis de las disposiciones patrimoniales del Código Civil chileno... more Este artículo presenta un análisis de las disposiciones patrimoniales del Código Civil chileno de 1855 desde una perspectiva de la historia social, pudiendo concebirse el Código como una fuente a partir de la cual estudiar las distinciones sociales existentes en la época. En particular, se busca relevar la presencia en este cuerpo de legislación de distintos grupos de clase media como artesanos, comerciantes, mineros, agricultores y empleados, haciendo notar la diferencia que éstos presentan con el trato otorgado a los sectores populares que aparecen visibilizados en el Código
Las opiniones expuestas en los trabajos publicados en esta Revista son de exclusiva responsabilid... more Las opiniones expuestas en los trabajos publicados en esta Revista son de exclusiva responsabilidad de sus autores y no corresponden necesariamente con las del IIDH o las de sus donantes.
Book chapters by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
¿Colegiatura obligatoria para la abogacía? Debates. , 2023
La experiencia histórica del sistema ético- disciplinario en el periodo 1925-1981 revela que la c... more La experiencia histórica del sistema ético- disciplinario en el periodo 1925-1981 revela que la colegiatura obligatoria no fue, por sí sola, un sistema efectivo para asegurar un adecuado control ético sobre la profesión jurídica.
Esta inefectividad se debió a tres causas. La primera fue el déficit de representatividad del Consejo General del Colegio de Abogados, que fue el principal órgano encargado de realizar el control ético. La segunda causa fue la falta de adaptación a los cambios sociales y la baja receptividad del Consejo General a las necesidades y requerimientos de la comunidad extra-profesional (es decir, los clientes y otras personas quienes sufrían las consecuencias de la falta de ética profesional). Esto impidió al Colegio de Abogados adaptar los procedimientos disciplinarios a un nuevo contexto de mayor demanda por el ejercicio del control ético. El tercer factor consistió en la paradójica y contradictoria relación del Colegio de Abogados con la política, que terminó por penetrar su sistema de control ético-disciplinario en un contexto de creciente polarización.
Tirant Lo Blanch, 2022
Este capítulo entrega un sintético recorrido sobre la articulación de las relaciones de género, e... more Este capítulo entrega un sintético recorrido sobre la articulación de las relaciones de género, el rol del Estado y el desarrollo del movimiento feminista en Chile desde finales del siglo XIX y durante el siglo XX. Tomando a Chile como caso de estudio, este capítulo muestra que, a lo largo del siglo XX, el movimiento feminista se desenvolvió en un contexto de fortalecimiento del modelo de familia patriarcal popular fomentado por el crecimiento del Estado de Bienestar. Estas circunstancias modelaron los discursos y las estrategias de incidencia del movimiento feminista, los que en la primera mitad del siglo XX tuvieron una fuerte impronta social y maternalista. En el mismo sentido, el ímpetu revolucionario de los proyectos políticos de izquierda en la década de los 60 y 70 que buscaron reforzar la intervención estatal tuvieron un rol limitado en cuestionar las estructuras patriarcales y fueron un contexto poco propicio para la articulación del movimiento feminista. Paradójicamente, la dictadura neoliberal liderada por Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) que vino a desmantelar el estado social en un contexto de sangrienta represión política creó las condiciones para el desarrollo de un feminismo más radical, permitiendo cuestionar los mecanismos mediante los cuales tanto el estado como el mercado reproducían la subordinación de las mujeres.
Histories of Legal Aid: A Comparative and International Perspective, 2022
By the mid-twentieth century, Chile could pride itself of having one of the most developed legal ... more By the mid-twentieth century, Chile could pride itself of having one of the most developed legal aid systems in Latin America, in terms of caseload and geographical coverage. The relative strength of legal aid in Chile was due to the firm commitment of the Bar Association (Colegio de Abogados de Chile) in creating and administering the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial), founded in 1932. Considering that in other countries bar associations were not so supportive of legal aid, the privileged relationship between the organized legal profession and legal aid in Chile requires an explanation.
This chapter argues that there were two important reasons behind the close link between the lawyers' guild and legal aid in Chile. The first one was that, very quickly, the Bar Association came to rely on legal aid for its own funding. Indeed, the Bar Association lobbied incessantly to obtain private but especially public funds to support its Legal Aid Service. Thus, legal aid allowed the Bar to gain access to growing public subsidies. These resources, directly administered by the Bar, became, progressively, the only source of income for the Bar itself.
The second reason was that the Bar Association resorted to the Legal Aid Service as a mechanism to reinforce its control over the new generations of lawyers, through training and disciplinary procedures. Indeed, as the Bar Association was established and controlled by the male rightwing legal elite based in Santiago, its main purpose was to rule over a new generation of lawyers of more diverse social background: middle-class, provincial, leftwing, and female lawyers. The Legal Aid Service was established from the start as the main training ground for the new members of the legal profession, through a mandatory six-month internship that all law graduates had to perform after finishing Law School. Additionally, the Bar Association acquired the oversight of court-appointed lawyers on rotation (abogados de turno) who were obliged to defend the poor for free. Lawyers who failed to fulfill these requirements could be subjected to the Bar disciplinary procedures. By reinforcing the mechanisms of training and control of the traditional legal elite over the new generation of lawyers, legal aid buttressed the internal hierarchies within the legal profession. Therefore, the Bar Association had a strong stake in the development of the Legal Aid Service, explaining why both institutions emerged and grew in tandem in the first half of the twentieth century.
However, to the extent that legal aid was more about preserving a specific balance of power within the profession than about the interests of the popular classes that it claimed to serve, the Bar Association’s engagement with this self-imposed function was fraught.
In the first place, the funds destined to legal aid eventually came to bankroll the Bar Association itself. The relationship between the Bar Association and the Legal Aid Service thus moved quickly from symbiosis to parasitism, given that the Bar ended up absorbing some of the funding that should have been destined to legal aid. Secondly, there were conflicting interests between the requirements posed by, on the one hand, the training and control of lawyers, and on the other, the need to answer to the growing demand for free legal services. In the third place, as legal aid came to work as a mechanism of control, it faced the resistance of lawyers to the imposition of this new form of discipline. The Bar elite leadership was hesitant of being too severe in exercising its disciplinary control, by fear of alienating its constituency. Therefore, they ended up privileging professional solidarity over an effective control of the quality of the service delivered by legal aid practitioners.
As a result, the intermingled relationship between the Legal Aid Service and the Bar, which acted initially as a positive synergy allowing the mutual reinforcement and expansion of both institutions, over time became detrimental to the Legal Aid Service.
Paradoxically, by putting legal aid at the service of the legal profession, and not the other way around, the Bar Association was digging its own grave: by the 1960s, as the country embarked in a new era of structural reforms, both the Legal Aid Service and the Bar Association failed to adapt to the new context and entered a period of crisis. The crisis would eventually resolve in 1981, with the dissociation of the link between the Bar and the Legal Aid Service. The separation of these two bodies meant the demise of the Bar Association as a relevant institution in Chilean politics and society, as it lost, with its powers over legal aid, most of its financial resources as well as its disciplinary jurisdiction.
Este artículo explora cómo funciona la selectividad de la memoria considerando un aspecto específ... more Este artículo explora cómo funciona la selectividad de la memoria considerando un aspecto específico del gobierno de la Unidad Popular: su relación con la legalidad y la justicia. En efecto, como se mostrará, existen algunas “memorias emblemáticas” que se vinculan con la legalidad o ilegalidad de las principales políticas económicas de la UP. Asimismo, hay otro grupo de memorias asociadas al rol del Poder Judicial en la oposición al gobierno de Allende. Sin embargo, hay un tercer aspecto de la relación entre el gobierno de Allende con la legalidad y la justicia que es mucho menos conocido: se trata de un conjunto de proyectos del gobierno de la Unidad Popular que buscaban expandir el acceso de los sectores populares al sistema de justicia. A este paquete de políticas me referiré como “el Programa de Acceso a la Justicia de la UP”.
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Books by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
En este libro se busca romper el mito –muy afincado en la historiografía chilena– que le asigna al Estado Docente decimonónico un rol determinante en la creación y surgimiento de la clase media chilena y cuestiona, de paso, la idea de una temprana movilidad social en Chile promovida por el sistema de educación pública.
A partir de una reinterpretación de la historiografía sobre los sectores populares en Chile, la autora visibiliza la existencia de una clase media de rasgos empresariales presente ya a inicios de la República, la que estaba conformada por artesanos, comerciantes, mineros y propietarios rurales. Demuestra que fueron estos sectores, y no las clases populares –como se cree–, los que se insertaron en el sistema educacional público. Estos sectores empresariales de clase media que accedieron al Liceo, y en menor medida a la Universidad, habrían sido los principales integrantes de los grupos de intelectuales, empleados públicos y privados que irrumpieron en la escena política a principios del siglo XX.
Así, al preguntarse por los orígenes, las características y la evolución de la clase media chilena, este libro trata de poner en perspectiva histórica un debate actual: el rol de la educación como base de la promoción social y las formas de reproducción de las desigualdades sociales en Chile.
Abstract:
This book challenges the well-settled idea in traditional Chilean historiography that considers the public education system as the place where the Chilean middle class was forged, and through this hypothesis, it confronts the notion of the public education as a vehicle of social mobility.
Reinterpreting the notion of “popular classes” in the 19th century Chile, the author posits the existence of an early middle class group of producers and merchants, showing how they were able to build social networks, how they gained access to the dominant culture and to the recognition of their social status. These elements were crucial to allow their integration in the public education system. On the contrary, this integration was not possible for the popular sectors: through several mechanisms, they were systematically excluded.
However, for the middle class groups, the access to formal education deeply changed their identity: from being independent producers, they were transformed into public officials, private employees and intellectuals. This group was the one able to gain a relevant position in the public debate since the 1920s.
In this way, this book throws some historical perspective on a current debate: the capacity of public education in promoting social mobility, and the role of state institutions in reproducing social inequalities.
En este tercer encuentro, se abordó la conexión entre los derechos humanos y la transparencia y lucha contra la corrupción, centrándose específicamente en la utilización de las herramientas del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos para la promoción de ambas agendas.
Papers by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
This special issue shows the scholarship developed by a new generation of people dedicated to Socio-Legal Studies in Chile. Our interdisciplinary group has been gathering since the mid-2010s and got formalized in 2018 as the Chilean Law and Society Group. The history of socio-legal studies in Chile shows continuities and ruptures from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. In this special issue, each article offers innovative methodological and theoretical perspectives developed in the last decade in the Socio-Legal field in Chile. At its core, this special issue rethinks law as both a reproducer of structural inequality and as a tool for social transformation.
Book chapters by Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux
Esta inefectividad se debió a tres causas. La primera fue el déficit de representatividad del Consejo General del Colegio de Abogados, que fue el principal órgano encargado de realizar el control ético. La segunda causa fue la falta de adaptación a los cambios sociales y la baja receptividad del Consejo General a las necesidades y requerimientos de la comunidad extra-profesional (es decir, los clientes y otras personas quienes sufrían las consecuencias de la falta de ética profesional). Esto impidió al Colegio de Abogados adaptar los procedimientos disciplinarios a un nuevo contexto de mayor demanda por el ejercicio del control ético. El tercer factor consistió en la paradójica y contradictoria relación del Colegio de Abogados con la política, que terminó por penetrar su sistema de control ético-disciplinario en un contexto de creciente polarización.
This chapter argues that there were two important reasons behind the close link between the lawyers' guild and legal aid in Chile. The first one was that, very quickly, the Bar Association came to rely on legal aid for its own funding. Indeed, the Bar Association lobbied incessantly to obtain private but especially public funds to support its Legal Aid Service. Thus, legal aid allowed the Bar to gain access to growing public subsidies. These resources, directly administered by the Bar, became, progressively, the only source of income for the Bar itself.
The second reason was that the Bar Association resorted to the Legal Aid Service as a mechanism to reinforce its control over the new generations of lawyers, through training and disciplinary procedures. Indeed, as the Bar Association was established and controlled by the male rightwing legal elite based in Santiago, its main purpose was to rule over a new generation of lawyers of more diverse social background: middle-class, provincial, leftwing, and female lawyers. The Legal Aid Service was established from the start as the main training ground for the new members of the legal profession, through a mandatory six-month internship that all law graduates had to perform after finishing Law School. Additionally, the Bar Association acquired the oversight of court-appointed lawyers on rotation (abogados de turno) who were obliged to defend the poor for free. Lawyers who failed to fulfill these requirements could be subjected to the Bar disciplinary procedures. By reinforcing the mechanisms of training and control of the traditional legal elite over the new generation of lawyers, legal aid buttressed the internal hierarchies within the legal profession. Therefore, the Bar Association had a strong stake in the development of the Legal Aid Service, explaining why both institutions emerged and grew in tandem in the first half of the twentieth century.
However, to the extent that legal aid was more about preserving a specific balance of power within the profession than about the interests of the popular classes that it claimed to serve, the Bar Association’s engagement with this self-imposed function was fraught.
In the first place, the funds destined to legal aid eventually came to bankroll the Bar Association itself. The relationship between the Bar Association and the Legal Aid Service thus moved quickly from symbiosis to parasitism, given that the Bar ended up absorbing some of the funding that should have been destined to legal aid. Secondly, there were conflicting interests between the requirements posed by, on the one hand, the training and control of lawyers, and on the other, the need to answer to the growing demand for free legal services. In the third place, as legal aid came to work as a mechanism of control, it faced the resistance of lawyers to the imposition of this new form of discipline. The Bar elite leadership was hesitant of being too severe in exercising its disciplinary control, by fear of alienating its constituency. Therefore, they ended up privileging professional solidarity over an effective control of the quality of the service delivered by legal aid practitioners.
As a result, the intermingled relationship between the Legal Aid Service and the Bar, which acted initially as a positive synergy allowing the mutual reinforcement and expansion of both institutions, over time became detrimental to the Legal Aid Service.
Paradoxically, by putting legal aid at the service of the legal profession, and not the other way around, the Bar Association was digging its own grave: by the 1960s, as the country embarked in a new era of structural reforms, both the Legal Aid Service and the Bar Association failed to adapt to the new context and entered a period of crisis. The crisis would eventually resolve in 1981, with the dissociation of the link between the Bar and the Legal Aid Service. The separation of these two bodies meant the demise of the Bar Association as a relevant institution in Chilean politics and society, as it lost, with its powers over legal aid, most of its financial resources as well as its disciplinary jurisdiction.
En este libro se busca romper el mito –muy afincado en la historiografía chilena– que le asigna al Estado Docente decimonónico un rol determinante en la creación y surgimiento de la clase media chilena y cuestiona, de paso, la idea de una temprana movilidad social en Chile promovida por el sistema de educación pública.
A partir de una reinterpretación de la historiografía sobre los sectores populares en Chile, la autora visibiliza la existencia de una clase media de rasgos empresariales presente ya a inicios de la República, la que estaba conformada por artesanos, comerciantes, mineros y propietarios rurales. Demuestra que fueron estos sectores, y no las clases populares –como se cree–, los que se insertaron en el sistema educacional público. Estos sectores empresariales de clase media que accedieron al Liceo, y en menor medida a la Universidad, habrían sido los principales integrantes de los grupos de intelectuales, empleados públicos y privados que irrumpieron en la escena política a principios del siglo XX.
Así, al preguntarse por los orígenes, las características y la evolución de la clase media chilena, este libro trata de poner en perspectiva histórica un debate actual: el rol de la educación como base de la promoción social y las formas de reproducción de las desigualdades sociales en Chile.
Abstract:
This book challenges the well-settled idea in traditional Chilean historiography that considers the public education system as the place where the Chilean middle class was forged, and through this hypothesis, it confronts the notion of the public education as a vehicle of social mobility.
Reinterpreting the notion of “popular classes” in the 19th century Chile, the author posits the existence of an early middle class group of producers and merchants, showing how they were able to build social networks, how they gained access to the dominant culture and to the recognition of their social status. These elements were crucial to allow their integration in the public education system. On the contrary, this integration was not possible for the popular sectors: through several mechanisms, they were systematically excluded.
However, for the middle class groups, the access to formal education deeply changed their identity: from being independent producers, they were transformed into public officials, private employees and intellectuals. This group was the one able to gain a relevant position in the public debate since the 1920s.
In this way, this book throws some historical perspective on a current debate: the capacity of public education in promoting social mobility, and the role of state institutions in reproducing social inequalities.
En este tercer encuentro, se abordó la conexión entre los derechos humanos y la transparencia y lucha contra la corrupción, centrándose específicamente en la utilización de las herramientas del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos para la promoción de ambas agendas.
This special issue shows the scholarship developed by a new generation of people dedicated to Socio-Legal Studies in Chile. Our interdisciplinary group has been gathering since the mid-2010s and got formalized in 2018 as the Chilean Law and Society Group. The history of socio-legal studies in Chile shows continuities and ruptures from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. In this special issue, each article offers innovative methodological and theoretical perspectives developed in the last decade in the Socio-Legal field in Chile. At its core, this special issue rethinks law as both a reproducer of structural inequality and as a tool for social transformation.
Esta inefectividad se debió a tres causas. La primera fue el déficit de representatividad del Consejo General del Colegio de Abogados, que fue el principal órgano encargado de realizar el control ético. La segunda causa fue la falta de adaptación a los cambios sociales y la baja receptividad del Consejo General a las necesidades y requerimientos de la comunidad extra-profesional (es decir, los clientes y otras personas quienes sufrían las consecuencias de la falta de ética profesional). Esto impidió al Colegio de Abogados adaptar los procedimientos disciplinarios a un nuevo contexto de mayor demanda por el ejercicio del control ético. El tercer factor consistió en la paradójica y contradictoria relación del Colegio de Abogados con la política, que terminó por penetrar su sistema de control ético-disciplinario en un contexto de creciente polarización.
This chapter argues that there were two important reasons behind the close link between the lawyers' guild and legal aid in Chile. The first one was that, very quickly, the Bar Association came to rely on legal aid for its own funding. Indeed, the Bar Association lobbied incessantly to obtain private but especially public funds to support its Legal Aid Service. Thus, legal aid allowed the Bar to gain access to growing public subsidies. These resources, directly administered by the Bar, became, progressively, the only source of income for the Bar itself.
The second reason was that the Bar Association resorted to the Legal Aid Service as a mechanism to reinforce its control over the new generations of lawyers, through training and disciplinary procedures. Indeed, as the Bar Association was established and controlled by the male rightwing legal elite based in Santiago, its main purpose was to rule over a new generation of lawyers of more diverse social background: middle-class, provincial, leftwing, and female lawyers. The Legal Aid Service was established from the start as the main training ground for the new members of the legal profession, through a mandatory six-month internship that all law graduates had to perform after finishing Law School. Additionally, the Bar Association acquired the oversight of court-appointed lawyers on rotation (abogados de turno) who were obliged to defend the poor for free. Lawyers who failed to fulfill these requirements could be subjected to the Bar disciplinary procedures. By reinforcing the mechanisms of training and control of the traditional legal elite over the new generation of lawyers, legal aid buttressed the internal hierarchies within the legal profession. Therefore, the Bar Association had a strong stake in the development of the Legal Aid Service, explaining why both institutions emerged and grew in tandem in the first half of the twentieth century.
However, to the extent that legal aid was more about preserving a specific balance of power within the profession than about the interests of the popular classes that it claimed to serve, the Bar Association’s engagement with this self-imposed function was fraught.
In the first place, the funds destined to legal aid eventually came to bankroll the Bar Association itself. The relationship between the Bar Association and the Legal Aid Service thus moved quickly from symbiosis to parasitism, given that the Bar ended up absorbing some of the funding that should have been destined to legal aid. Secondly, there were conflicting interests between the requirements posed by, on the one hand, the training and control of lawyers, and on the other, the need to answer to the growing demand for free legal services. In the third place, as legal aid came to work as a mechanism of control, it faced the resistance of lawyers to the imposition of this new form of discipline. The Bar elite leadership was hesitant of being too severe in exercising its disciplinary control, by fear of alienating its constituency. Therefore, they ended up privileging professional solidarity over an effective control of the quality of the service delivered by legal aid practitioners.
As a result, the intermingled relationship between the Legal Aid Service and the Bar, which acted initially as a positive synergy allowing the mutual reinforcement and expansion of both institutions, over time became detrimental to the Legal Aid Service.
Paradoxically, by putting legal aid at the service of the legal profession, and not the other way around, the Bar Association was digging its own grave: by the 1960s, as the country embarked in a new era of structural reforms, both the Legal Aid Service and the Bar Association failed to adapt to the new context and entered a period of crisis. The crisis would eventually resolve in 1981, with the dissociation of the link between the Bar and the Legal Aid Service. The separation of these two bodies meant the demise of the Bar Association as a relevant institution in Chilean politics and society, as it lost, with its powers over legal aid, most of its financial resources as well as its disciplinary jurisdiction.
The relative success of the Bar Association in imposing its model of lawyering in the first half of the twentieth century allows us to understand why the legalistic framework that Chilean lawyers had inherited from the nineteenth century did not change over the course of the twentieth despite the momentous social and political evolution that both profession and country experienced in this period.
The history of the Chilean Bar Association thus provides an institutional explanation for the continuity of ideas about the law in the face of accelerated social transformations. At the same time, by revealing the tensions and the resistance that this project faced, the history of the Bar also reveals the gears that would eventually lead to the legal profession’s historical change.
Analysis of 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections in Chile, and the role of the new leftist coalition Frente Amplio in this context.
Written in August 2017, this piece describes the position of the Chilean new left prior to Chile's Presidential and Parliamentary elections of November 19th, 2017.
En la práctica, estas ideas se tradujeron en la adopción de un diseño institucional semi-público, administrado por el Colegio de Abogados y no directamente por el Estado, e integrado mayoritariamente por estudiantes de derecho realizando su práctica profesional. De esta forma, se tendió más a favorecer los intereses del gremio de los abogados –como la formación de abogados jóvenes, y una mayor legitimidad de la voz del Colegio de Abogados en los asuntos públicos- más que los objetivos de “justicia social.” Al mismo tiempo, estos consultorios jurídicos se transformaron en un lugar de contacto entre diferentes actores –abogados, estudiantes, asistentes sociales, patrocinados de sectores populares- marcados por colaboración y conflictos basados en el género, la edad y, por supuesto, la clase social. De esta forma, los Servicios de Asistencia Judicial pueden ser leídos no solamente en función de su efecto en el acceso a la justicia para los más pobres, sino como un espacio institucional que ayudó a reforzar, re-inscribir, pero también desafiar jerarquías sociales en un momento clave de redefinición del rol del Estado en Chile.
First, I analyze the creation of the SAJ between 1928 and 1934. This project originated neither in the working class, nor in the state, but in the recently created Chilean Bar Association. I show how the creation of this legal aid service was possible because it met the specific interests of the newly organized legal community, which was in need of public funding and political legitimation. In the context of the “social question,” this legitimation could only come from a “social” intervention: for lawyers, this meant legal aid.
Then, I describe the everyday practices of this service between the 1930s and 1960s through the discourses of the SAJ personnel. I argue that the SAJ institutional structure, instead of shortening the distance between the poor and the justice system, established several “layers” of intermediaries: first social workers, then law students, and only then staff lawyers. These professionals conceived of this institution as essential in educating the popular sectors in their rights and obligations, specifically in the areas of labor, criminal, and family law. In these realms, the SAJ promoted compromise over conflict, individual over collective rights, and a vertically-imposed notion of civil and welfare rights. Thus, by translating and re-interpreting the popular sectors’ claims to the justice system, these intermediaries intended to make them fit into their own conceptions of “social justice.” Yet, by the 1970s, it had become clear that this project was contested.
The UP developed indeed several policies aimed at dealing with a long-lasting issue in the Chilean legal system: the barriers that the popular classes encountered to solve their problems through legal means. Among these, I will consider especially two: the project to create Neighborhood Courts (“Tribunales Vecinales”) and, the reform to the public legal aid system (“Servicio Nacional Jurídico”). I argue that the history of the UP’s Access to Justice Program, and especially the one of the Servicio Nacional Jurídico, goes against the grain of the traditional narratives of the Allende period as one of political violence and illegalities, for the right, and of revolutionary change and class struggle, for the left.
Several aspects made the Servicio Nacional Jurídico “unmemorable.” For instance, it reflected some contradictions within the UP government: it was a reformist and even to some extent conservative project whose ultimate goal was to keep the popular classes “within the law,” and in this respect it presented strong continuities with the decades prior to the UP. But it also had aspects of a radical or even revolutionary project that contested the technocratic, professional power of lawyers. The debates around this project also reflected the inconsistencies of one specific group among Allende’s opponents: the Chilean Bar Association or Colegio de Abogados. I show that besides or beyond the lawyers’ social class and political affiliation, what the Colegio was defending against the UP was also the status of the legal profession, its professional power.