Publications

Practical Guide of the International System of Protection of Human Rights

Catalina Botero Marino, Diana Esther Guzmán Rodríguez

The guide is an effort to improve the quality and availability of the information regarding the systems in place to protect human rights. It serves as a reference for individuals interested in the relation of justice, conflict, law and order to human rights. The guide offers tools and methods for effective monitoring of human rights as related to international provisions.

The Letter and Spirit of the Law

Diego E. López Medina

This book seeks to revive the practical and academic discussion that lawyers have with the relation between the “methods of interpretation” of law. The philosophy of language, the linguistics, the cognitive science and the communication studies can offer new perspectives on the themes explored in this book and that intend to enrich the already known disputes. In particular, the author offers a theoretical reconstruction of opposition between the “letter” of the law and the “spirit” where he seeks to show that the norms do not have “obvious and natural meanings”. Finally, the author criticizes the false technical speciality of legal “hermeneutics” that moves away from the expectations and hopes of common citizens.

An ethical question

The right to life is absolute according to the Catholic Church in the debate related to the abortion. Professor Diego López questions if certain forms of analysis benefit-cost are not also against this moral doctrine.

Globalization-Non-governmental Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American and Global Perspectives (David Clark,ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006)

César Rodríguez Garavito

Processes of economic globalization underway since the early 1970s pose new regulatory dilemmas. The mismatch between global economic processes, on the one hand, and national regulations, on the other, creates what Sassen has aptly called a ?regulatory fracture,? stemming from the fact that ?economic processes diverge from the model for which extant regulations were designed? (Sassen 1998: 155). Debates about how to deal with such a regulatory fracture are today at the forefront of law and society research on globalization and have given rise to a host of regulatory experiments around the world. A growing number of sociolegal analyses and institutional experiments emphasize non-governmental approaches to regulation, that is, forms of economic and political coordination in which private organizations ?from corporations to civic associations? take on regulatory tasks that were hitherto reserved to the state. From this perspective, forms of global governance have the potential to solve some of the problems faced by national governments in the global economy.

The Laws of the Judges

Diego E. López Medina

The Laws of Judges, already a classic of Colombian Legal Literature, offers in this second edition a substantial revision of its content and structure. The book, now with various new chapters, includes the following points of views:
-It offers for the first time, a comparative look at how to utilize the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Justice, the State Counsel, and the Constitutional Court in the reasoning for their failures.
-It exposes in detail the form of how the Third Constitutional Court has understood and used the doctrine of precedent since 2001.
-It presents new and sharp reflections about the dynamic and static analysis of sentences that will be profitable to analysts and investigators of constitutional law.
-Finally, it abounds the history of the jurisprudence in Colombia, to the presentation of the fascinating process of creation of the Supreme Court of Justice in the period of Regeneration of Núñez and with this its discussions of “legal doctrine” and “probable doctrine” to the time that examines the contemporary importance of these concepts in Colombian law.

Colombia-Law and Society Activities Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American and Global Perspectives

César Rodríguez Garavito

Law and society activities took off in the 1980s and have experienced a boom since the 1990s. They involve numerous university research centers, think tanks and NGOs, and cover such topics as the administration of justice, the legal profession, law and political violence, human rights, and legal pluralism.

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