1Law, social change and lawyers in Chile: From the shrillness of the 60s to the silence of today

When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation— when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their habits to it— when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty—I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character, and those customs, which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honour. E. Burke In this draft, I present some reflections on law and social change in Chile. I focus on the legal academy and, more particularly, its attitude towards this theme, starting from the nineteen sixties. This attitude has evolved since then in an interesting way. It made a forceful first appearance in the 60s, when the relations between law and social change were the general object of discussion by a significant part of the legal academy. These were the times when state planned development, under the wings of theories of modernization, was at its height. In this context, the academy became self-critical and looked into legal education, in order to overcome the way in which, supposedly, law was out of pace with the progress of society. However, the process of curricular reform pushed on by this diagnostic was prematurely and violently interrupted by the military coup of 1973. With the coup, the university was intervened and a counter-reform soon imposed. At the same time, the issue of the relations between law and social change, so recurrent before, was no longer topic of discussion. Even now, 30 years later