DRCLAS: States of Exception and the Rise of Human Rights in Latin America (1977-1990)

The talk addresses the way in which left and right wing political and legal thinkers came to embrace human rights discourses within the framework of authoritarian regimes. These discourses attempted to defuse a set of constitutional theories that justified repression, coups and/or military governments during the twentieth century. Human rights affected constitutional debates about rights in the 1980s and 1990s, partly in light of the intellectual and social domestic conflicts taking place in different Latin American countries. The talk will focus in the cases of Argentina, Chile and Colombia. 

Jorge González, Associate Profesor and Head of the Philosophy of Law and Legal History Department at Universidad Javeriana - Bogotá. He holds an SJD (Juridical Science Doctorate) from Harvard Law School and teaches Comparative Constitutional Law, Legal History and Human Rights. He recently published his book: Estados de Excepción y Democracia Liberal en América del Sur (Editorial Javeriana, 2015)

Moderated by: Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard Law School. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Colombian Student Society