Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte, Law Schools as Places of Brokerage A Study on Hierarchy, Socialization, and the Buenos Aires Legal Field. Red de Estudios Empíricos en Derecho (REED), Instituto Gioja, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 4 de septiembre de 2025.
Envío del trabajo: Aug 27, 2025
This paper studies who teaches law at the University of Buenos Aires Law School. It is based on an original dataset of individuals working in different organizations, built from different sources that make possible the representation of Law School trainers as a social network, to be subjected to social network analyses (SNA). This approach permits several structural calculations of the network that are significant from the point of view of the literature on legal academia in Argentina and in Latin America more generally, that has complained about its conservatism, its formalism, and—most importantly—its part-time nature. The analysis provisionally proves something the literature has already posited: that classrooms in Law Schools are places where lawyers and judges meet, raising a number of important normative questions. Furthermore, the network is an ideal site of power brokering, which may explain why legal education reform (that has made great progress in many Latin American countries) has not catched up in Argentina. This paper seeks to promote a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. It further hopes to open new avenues of research to better explain how social capital is construed and developed within the part-time legal training system.