These personal relationships have expanded through the years in terms of the number of people, the substantive programs, and the concrete activities involved - student exchanges, working trips for professors, jointly organized seminars, special classes taught by visiting scholars, and mutual efforts to create or improve publications and law libraries. Behind all of these developments there has been an enormous effort on the part of several people who, for different reasons, have led the process. Among them is Professor Carlos S. Nino of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, who accompanies us in all our activities through the participation of his disciples and friends.
It was in this context that a new idea took shape: a seminar that would create a space for reflection for the growing number of people who shared common interests. One afternoon in New Haven, Professors Owen Fiss and Robert Burt, together with then LL.M. candidates Lucas Sierra and Roberto Saba, acknowledged that the study trips and the mutual visits and exchanges had moved beyond a particular circle of legal academics in the Southern Cone and some of their peers at Yale Law School. The expansion of this group was not limited to Yale Law School alumni. Rather, the circle was reaching a group of scholars who appeared to share a certain vision of law, its relation to democratic values, and the urgent need to begin a substantive intellectual discussion about legal matters. It seemed necessary, then, to generate something that would begin to create links among these scholars and strengthen the incipient continental legal community whose peculiarities made it look, in some of our countries, like a counter-cultural phenomenon.
These goals explain some of the guidelines adopted by SELA from the start, which have given it the character and personality that, in our judgment, distinguish it from other meetings of law professors in the region. The first of these goals was that of consolidating a community of legal dialogue. This required us to focus on the topics to be discussed, and the relationships among participants. Secondly, the seminar discussions had to reflect the intellectually honest, sharp, and critical style that had surprised and influenced those of us who had gotten a chance to know countries with academic traditions stronger than our own. No one would assume the role of “lecturer” or “expert professor” at the debate table. SELA would be a meeting for intellectual work, not a set of lectures. Its panels and meetings would be characterized by deep and analytic discussion among peers, rather than a reiterated formula of presentations followed by questions addressed to the speakers.
The subject matters to be chosen would be about law—not about “constitutional,” “commercial,” “civil,” or “criminal” law. The idea that law cannot be divided into boxes with clear-cut labels was fundamental to the kind of discussion we sought. All participants, regardless of their specific area of expertise, would need to be able to participate on an equal footing with regard to respect, commitment, and seriousness. For the same reason, topics would have to be sufficiently general to allow for a conversation in which each participant could draw on her own vision, in order to create an exchange of approaches that would enrich the debate.
The ambitiousness of these aims made us doubt that the seminar could achieve them. Could we build an intellectual space where each of us would get rid of “her special field” approach in order to discuss law and its relationship to logic, history, politics, economics, ethics, and philosophy? Could the discussions be preceded by the work of panelists who prepared papers and participants who read those papers critically in preparation for discussion? Would it be possible to generate an academic debate among peers that interested everyone in the seminar?
Since that winter in New Haven, eleven meetings have taken place. The first one was in Santiago, Chile (1995), on “Law and Morality,” and the last one in Bogotá, Colombia (2006) on “Executive Power.”
Originally, five institutions sponsored SELA: the law schools of the Universidad de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales (Chile), Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Universidad de Palermo (Argentina), and Yale Law School. However, thanks to SELA’s success and dynamism, the number of participants increased from fifty to one hundred in only four years. Other institutions that joined in sponsoring the seminar were: Universidade de Sao Paulo, Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Universidad de los Andes, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, Instituto Paraguayo de Derecho Constitucional, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
SELA’s success has undoubtedly been due to all of these shared institutional and personal efforts. But the seminar owes its existence to professors Owen Fiss, Robert Burt, and Daniel Markovits who, prompted by their ongoing interest in helping to develop legal debate on democratic issues in the Americas, have worked generously in designing, promoting, and organizing SELA.
We can say with genuine satisfaction that SELA has utterly exceeded our expectations. The number of institutions and people involved has increased significantly, and the successive meetings have given rise to debate that is recreated with renewed spirits year after year, conferring a sense of academic community on its participants.
By Andrés Jana, Santiago, Chile and Roberto Saba, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Excerpts, Yale Law Report, Winter 2000.