II Graduate Conference on Latin American Law and Policy
The II Graduate Conference on Latin American Law and Policy brought to Oxford dozens of faculty members, doctoral candidates, and general public to discuss various contemporary socio-legal challenges on the continent. In his opening remarks, the Dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor Timothy Endicott, presented the event as a breakthrough, which has created an important opportunity for debating these issues and suggests promising links with the Latin American Centre, UCL, and law schools from Latin America. The Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Dr Fernanda Pirie, highlighted the rich variety of themes in the different panels. Dr Timothy Power, representing the Latin American Centre, also emphasized the importance of the conference and wished everyone a great event.
The conference included three keynote speakers from renowned Latin American law schools: Dean Joaquim Falcao (FGV Law School); Dean Helena Alviar (Los Andes Law School); and Professor Roberto Gargarella (Torcuato di Tella). In addition, there were three panels that combined faculty members from Oxford, UCL, St. Gallen, Toronto, and Max Planck Institute as chairs and discussants with eleven doctoral candidates from the universities of Oxford, UCL, Edinburgh, Cork, Warwick, Reading, Queen Mary, and Brasilia. Interestingly, the first panelist was an Irish PhD candidate, whose research explored the concept of supremocracy coined by Dean Oscar Vilhena (GV Law) to refer to the Brazilian Supreme Court. Likewise, the final panelist was a Nigerian PhD candidate, whose work defends the Brazilian strategy of incorporating the right to healthcare into copyright law to expand access to medicaments. These two examples show the importance of Latin American law and policy beyond the continent.
In their final remarks, the conference organisers echoed the opening remarks, to the effect that the conference has not only provided a comprehensive panoramic view of Latin American law and policy, but also to put these subjects in Oxford's intellectual map.