The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of
Legal Studies

The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of Legal Studies (LACJLS) is the official, annually issued, journal of the Latin American and Caribbean Law and Economics Association (ALACDE). LACJLS is a program of inter-university cooperation between American Justice School of Law and the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The journal seeks to promote the rule of law in the Latin America-Caribbean area by promoting academic discussion and research on a cluster of inter-related topics including comparative law and economics, instrumentalist, consequentialist legal theory, economic analysis of Roman law, and economic history. In the same manner that comparative law cannot be pursued without regard to legal history, economic history is necessary to complement the study of comparative law and economics.

European legal scholars lament what appears to be the 'Americanisation of European legal culture,' and are geared to preventing vagabond and debased American legal thinking from flooding their shores. Latin American and Caribbean legal scholars share a European sensibility; we have this constant 'Anglo Americanisation' of our culture as well. However, unlike the Europeans who reject the value of this alien legal scholarship, in adopting the new paradigm, Latin American and Caribbean legal scholars will make it over; much in the way Christopher Columbus Langdell ripped apart civil-law legal science and continental attempts to rationalise whole systems of law by codification and refashioned a common-law legal science based on the case method. We will take the best Anglo American legal scholarship over and rethink and refashion it into a new legal science, within the vein of our own tradition of intellectual critique as well as academic scholarship, to meet the new demands of development in emerging Latin American and Caribbean economies.

Two seemingly incongruous academic disciplines—rational choice theory and area studies—will be brought together in a, sometimes uneasy, mix of empirically verifiable models in search of universal validity, with a historian's eye for contextual detail. However, sensitivity to what drives a particular legal culture is vital to a project meant for pedagogic purposes or for generating interest in law and economics among a new generation of Latin American and Caribbean lawyers, judges and legal scholars. Under our proposal, much like Karl von Savigny's, a vast (and unheralded) collaboration between legal historians and law-and-economics scholars will place our efforts squarely within the great Civilian tradition which we have inherited.

Today in Latin America and the Caribbean, many scholars view with skepticism the bitter rift that divides traditional, doctrinaire approaches to legal studies and the application of economic analysis to law, which is preoccupied with the consequences of laws and judicial decisions in a variety of fields. It is our hope that this timely merger between traditionally separate academic fields—Roman law and law and economics—may help to heal this bitter rift in the Latin America-Caribbean area.

We aspire to nothing less than moving past the ultimate monument of 19th century civilian legal science, the German Burgerliches Gesetzbuch of 1900. The legal order does not embody the civil law—as many in Europe would have it—as a formalistic system along the lines of the axiomatic and deductive reasoning postulated by the natural lawyers. Nor does it embody the procedural instrumentalism of das Postulat der Einheit der Rechtsordnung, with its tone of social-scientific rationality at its blandest and most perfectly value-neutral. More modestly and simply, codifications of civil law in Latin America and the Caribbean have a coherence—not so much a geometry or rigorous instrumental precision—that is based on a private legal system: the Roman law, as embodied in the accumulated wisdom and experience of the Roman people for over a thousand years, as the be-all and end-all of the civil law.