Participant: Hernando Gutierrez-Prieto
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

Up to now evolutionary theory and legal transplants constitute the mainstream doctrines related to legal change. Both of them lead to significant situation in which the theories seem to reach a profound limit. Evolutionary explanations of legal change are adaptations incapable today to explain “legal revolutions” in part because of their emphasis to Law and economics approach. Legal transplants have a great explanatory capacity but they usually crashed in real praxis especially in developing countries –like Colombia and other similar ones and its original proposal has been continuously debated. The paper includes some descriptions and analysis of both from a systemic point of view. It also assesses the role of analogies and/or metaphors in this discussion.

On the other hand, descriptions of legal change far from equilibrium (using an analogy to what Prigogine described as chemical changes far from equilibrium and to living systems) could seem more adequate to real life. This “new” conceptualization needs as a prerequisite to determine the meaning, extent and the discussion of the possible application of such a concept as “legal equilibrium”. Its multiplicity, variety and the fact that it cannot be understood as a determined state are questions included in the paper.

This new approach could be useful in understanding legal revolutions as well as the permanent and systemic resistance to imported changes in normative orders without taking into account the system own history and dynamic values. In order to obtain a new envisioning in the current paradigm of understanding legal change we still lack of some intellectual tools –the most important of them being a concept of “legal equilibrium”.