Every semester I co-teach an Ethics class in the School of Law of the University of Palermo (Buenos Aires) with a pretty awesome senior professor who I like to think of as my mentor. Both the payroll and my contract say that I, too, am a “Professor” (with a capital P and everything!), but in my heart of hearts (and probably in my mentor’s as well), I’m still a junior trying to figure out what this university teaching stuff is all about. That’s why –despite my numerous years in translation and legal-linguistics– my PhD thesis is (much to everyone’s dismay, including my own) about teaching law (and not about Language and the Law). But I believe we can have more than one passion in life and sometimes these passions are only unrelated on the surface; hence, why I’m writing about teaching in a blog that apparently promises to be about something else.
So, despite what it seems, I don’t digress. Language and Law and university teaching all came together last week in my Ethics class when my students tried to find answers to the question of why life in Argentina is marked by anomy –particularly, what Carlos Nino (one of Argentina’s most prominent legal philosophers of the twentieth century) coined as “soft-headed anomy” [in his words in Spanish, “anomia boba”]. In trying to find answers to Argentina’s absolute disregard for the Law, one of my students blamed the language of the Law. According to this (unknowingly formalistic) student, a lot of Argentina’s problems could easily be solved by simply writing better laws. Fascinating! Imagine if it were that easy, if all we needed were better writing!
Although this is not the sort of answer one would expect from a modern day law student, when we look at the way in which the Law developed in time, and when we study legal philosophy (which, in a way, is also the study of the history of legal thought), we find that many world leaders, legal scholars and philosophers, drafters of constitutions, renowned judges, statespersons, etc. have shared this view (–otherwise how do you explain the core elements of continental law and its “fancy” Codes?). Thus, among other things, I will be exploring these ideas in this blog.
