The State and the Socio-Legal Development in Chile
The development of Socio-Legal studies in Chile has been neither linear nor homogeneous. Its history intertwines with the shifting fortunes of the State and the political transformations that have marked the country over the past century. This relationship has shaped both the material conditions of research and the forms of legitimacy of legal knowledge.
In recent years, Socio-Legal studies in Chile have undergone significant expansion. What only a decade ago appeared to be a scattered collection of individual efforts has evolved into an emerging interdisciplinary space of dialogue. This expansion has been accompanied by a growing collective self-awareness among socio-legal scholars. As elsewhere, the field responds to a broader need: to understand law as a social and material practice rather than merely a normative system. This trajectory has defined the intellectual foundations of the field and the political and institutional conditions of its production.
The broken Chilean sociological tradition of Law
During the 1960s and early 1970s, figures such as Edmundo Fuenzalida, Norbert Lechner, and Hugo Frühling—working from institutions like the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and the University of Chile—developed approaches to law that were situated rather than purely dogmatic. Their intellectual work sought to conceptualise law as a device embedded in the social transformations of their time: modernisation, authoritarianism, and state-building.
This early sociology of law was abruptly interrupted by the 1973 military dictatorship, which explicitly sought to dismantle critical spaces within academia and society. Many academics promoting innovative and socially engaged perspectives were expelled from universities, forced into exile, or pushed into marginal positions.
This process entailed not only the loss of an intellectual generation but also the institutional disarticulation of an emerging field. The nascent sociology of law lost its place, and what reoccupied the centre was the entrenched dogmatic legal tradition—now reinforced by an instrumental model of knowledge tightly bound to the authoritarian transformation of the State, which silenced critical approaches to law. The effects of that rupture persist to this day.
The reconfiguration of the field
Since the return to democracy, state modernisation processes—especially from the 2000s onward—have driven the expansion of socio-legal studies. Much of the momentum sustaining Chilean socio-legal studies today stems from these transformations.
Early work focused on human rights, reflecting the country’s traumatic political experience. However, a major impulse for the field came from procedural reforms in criminal, labour, and family justice. These large-scale institutional changes, which were implemented gradually through the 2000s, generated a growing need for empirical knowledge. Thus, judicial modernisation became a laboratory for socio-legal research, connecting legal academia with empirical observation of law and the State.
A second impulse emerged from a new generation of scholars trained abroad, particularly in universities in the UK, the USA, and Europe. State programmes from the National Agency for Research and Development enabled hundreds of researchers to pursue postgraduate studies in universities where socio-legal reflection held a strong institutional presence.
The above created new circuits of intellectual exchange between Chile and the Global North, reshaping Chilean academia. In socio-legal scholarship, this fostered diversification in areas such as gender equality, Indigenous rights, crime and security, migration, environmental issues, and constitutionalism—the latter strongly shaped by the failed reform attempts of 2022 and 2023 to change the legacy of the 1990 Constitution under the dictatorship. Along with these intellectual ties came the introduction of evaluation standards based on international indicators and publication formats aligned with global academic practices.
Yet the process of modernisation and increasing globalisation of the Chilean academy also generated growing distance from the field’s intellectual history in Chile and Latin America, manifested in a disconnection from critical genealogies, the loss of local references, and a limited appreciation of a historically grounded self-awareness.
Between the global and the local
Socio-legal studies in contemporary Chile do not start from scratch—despite the frequent recurrence of this idea among its own participants. Rather, what we witness today is the reactivation of an interrupted tradition, albeit through new methodological sensibilities and under different historical conditions.
The same public policies that allowed the field’s re-emergence also reinforced its dependence on global academic systems, often detaching it from the realities of the country and the region. In fact, the very use of the term socio-legal or law in society, which has gradually replaced longer-standing concepts such as sociology of law, reveals this process. Chilean socio-legal studies have thus developed within a double movement: on the one hand, driven by the State as part of its modernisation strategy; on the other, oriented toward theoretical models and academic metrics that frequently reproduce distance from local realities.
Revisiting the field’s link to Chile’s sociopolitical history allows us to understand its current challenge: to root global knowledge within its territories, institutions, and concrete conflicts. Today, the field faces the task of acknowledging the global circulation of ideas while recognizing itself within its historical becoming.
About the Author
Ignacio Riquelme Espinosa, Loreto Quiroz Rojas, Javier Velásquez Valenzuela, Cristian Leyton Navarro
Laboratorio de Estudios Socio-Legales (Socio-Legal Studies Laboratory, Lab ESL), Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile
The authors are researchers at the Laboratorio de Estudios Socio-Legales (Socio-Legal Studies Laboratory, Lab ESL), based at Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile. Lab ESL is dedicated to the interdisciplinary and critical study of law and society, contributing to the development of socio-legal studies in Chile and Latin America.