Echoes of transformation and crises. Debates on political institutions in Interwar Argentina within the University of Buenos Aires' Faculty of Law (1920s-1940s)

LÓPEZ, IGNACIO ALEJANDRO

Ann Arbor

Conferencia; LACS Lecture; 2017

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS), University of Michigan

Although Argentine historians have begun to analyze how politicians understood the crisis of democracy in the interwar period, few studies have explored how legal scholars understood the problems of the Argentine representative system and the broader crisis of the worldwide liberal constitutional order in the interwar period.This lecture focuses on debates over republican and federal systems in interwar Argentina, particularly through analysis of the scholarly production of professors and alumni linked to the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires. In this sense, it will analyze intersections between the worlds of academics and politics, and examine the most important diagnoses about the constitutional system and its actual operation in the view of one of the most important schools of Law in the country. In this context, the cases of the United States andEurope became crucial points of comparison, leading many to argue for the need to reform Argentina´s political institutions.