Escuela de Derecho

The undergraduate law program aims to provide the finest legal education to the next generation of leaders in the public and private arena, at the domestic, Latin American, and international levels. We prepare public spirited lawyers committed to the values of democracy, human rights, and the division of powers, willing to deploy their expertise in service to the country and the world, as well as lawyers that will successfully face the challenges posed by economic and cultural globalization, the development of information technologies, and the need to interact with professionals from other fields.  

Since the early days, lawyers have come to play a leadership and strategic role in society. In all stages, we have seen lawyers acting and having impact as leaders in the public and private arena, both at the domestic and international levels.  Consequently, unlike others, legal education plays a vital role and then ought to honor this mission.

A first-rate faculty is the foundation of a truly great education. Our success in this endeavor is illustrated by the number of colleagues who receive outstanding student evaluations each year and the high level of reported student satisfaction evident in repeated student surveys.

An outstanding faculty is not enough however. Students will not receive an outstanding legal education unless those leaders are in the classroom, teaching students. For this reason, since its inception, the Law School has always been committed to integrating research and teaching. Thus, one critical feature of our program is the fact that our foundational courses are mainly taught by full-time faculty, who are nationally and internationally recognized scholars. This commitment ensures that students benefit from the scholars who shape their fields.

The curriculum provides law students with both a basic liberal arts education and complete professional education. A purely vocational approach, which excludes the former education, would disregard the fact that law students in Argentina, unlike American law students, still need basic university instruction.  At Di Tella a tight intertwining of professional and academic courses serves both to enrich legal education and to show students the diverse ways in which law affects social values and practices.

According to our mixed approach to legal education, courses in philosophy, economics and history play an important role. Our syllabus also includes courses that are common in American colleges, like Critical Thinking and Applied Ethics.  Law students obtain from liberal arts teaching the kind of intellectual sophistication that the legal profession requires. The School takes pride in being the only law school in Argentina that teaches their students the history of the US constitutional process from primary sources.  It is also the only one in explaining their students the contributions of Scottish Enlightenment to social thought. 

The law curriculum is organized on the basis of a five-year program divided up into two levels: the Foundation-level Program (3 years) and the Upper-level Program (2 years).  While the former has mandatory courses, the latter has both mandatory and optional courses. Both programs offer professional and interdisciplinary courses.  

Whereas in the Foundation-level Program students are exposed to all of the major building blocks of law, students in the fourth and fifth years essentially design their own program of study: though there are still some mandatory courses that complete the Foundation-level Program, students may customize the curriculum to their individual professional interests and projects.  

We encourage our students to select courses from other undergraduate programs at UTDT (Economics, Business Administration, History, Architecture, Political Science, and International Relations). Our students are also allowed to take advanced courses from the School’s graduate programs: Master in Law and Economics, Master in Criminal Law, and Master in Tax Law.  

Strong training in critical thinking is especially appropriate to a law curriculum. Critical thinking no doubt provides legal practitioners with competitive advantages.  A cursory inspection of a standard law program suffices to show the variety of types of arguments that law students are exposed to. The study of law includes lots of deductive arguments – e.g., arguments purporting to show that a certain case falls within a certain legal rule, or arguments purporting to show that a legal rule conforms to the Constitution – along with empirical reasoning – e.g., arguments purporting to determine  the strength of the evidence for conviction in a criminal case. Indeed, legal problems import all the complexities attendant to the full range of empirical disciplines as these are potentially relevant to ascribing civil or criminal liability – think of the relevance of physics and physiology in malpractice suits where judges and lawyers are confronted with conflicting expert testimonies on, say, the stability of a bridge´s foundations or the side effects of a drug. Although neither law students nor judges are expected to master empirical disciplines, they must be able to arbitrate in principled ways conflicting expert testimonies – and judges are bound to do so. 

Various courses in the law program feature training in critical thinking: mandatory courses in analytical philosophy – e.g., “Moral Philosophy”, “Political Philosophy” – and economics – e.g., “Microeconomics”, “Macroeconomics”, and “Economic Analysis of Law.” Moreover, the program includes a specific course, “Logics and Writing”, inspired in critical thinking courses taught in American campuses. The aim of that course is to teach students how to construct clear, rigorous, and original arguments, as well as to detect fallacious arguments, which are usually used in public and legal discourse.  Students are also required to write a short paper every two weeks, which is expected to follow the format of papers published in scholarly journals. These papers are discussed with the professor in sessions.

From the very beginning, the international perspective has always been ancillary to our School. Our students are educated and prepared as future professionals that will interact in multicultural settings, handle cross-border transactions in a more and more globalized and integrated world. How do we secure an international perspective? 

The undergraduate curriculum complements its interdisciplinary education with an international dimension that allows our students and graduates to adapt to the constant legal changes of the globalized world, the demanding nature of jobs outside the country, or jobs that require knowledge of comparative law.  

We achieve this from a variety of tools: 

• International and Comparative Law Courses

• Legal Traditions and Multiculturalism

• Reading Materials

• Exchange Program

• Cooperation Agreement with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICT)

• Fellowships Agreement with the O´Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law of Georgetown University 

• Visiting Professors

The Revista Argentina de Teoría Jurídica  edited by undergraduate law students, is a law journal dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to legal studies. While the journal’s principal focus is legal theory, it also includes theoretical analysis of case-law, juridical commentary, notes, and surveys of literature. Students may also contribute to the journal with their original work.  

Since its founding in 1999, the journal has sought to contribute to and amplify traditional legal doctrine by exploring the connections between law, economics, moral and political philosophy, history, and political science. In 2009, with the publication of Volume 10, the journal celebrated 10 consecutive years of publication during which it has made its mark on legal scholarship in Argentina. 

The journal appears in both digital and paper formats. The digital format journal is issued biannually in June and November. It is available free of charge at the School’s website (www.utdt.edu/revistajuridica). The paper edition is tailored to a wider audience from various disciplinary backgrounds. It contains a selection of articles and notes that the editors consider pertinent to the general-interest reader. To date, there have been three paper issues of the journal. Paper issues are distributed for free to judges and reputed members of the legal profession.  The staff of Revista also organizes symposia, which are later in published in the journal. 

The direction and academic coordination of the journal is undertaken by a faculty member of the Law School. Other faculty members serve on the Advisory Board. 

Students improve their writing skills with the practice of editing, as well as by translating into Spanish papers published elsewhere, and develop the capacity to distinguish good texts from bad ones.

Currently, the undergraduate curriculum includes two legal clinics and several courses designed to breach the gap between law school and the legal profession. 

The Legal Clinic is a mandatory undergraduate law course in which Professors and students promote the defense of fundamental rights, the improvement of judicial institutions, and the justice, efficiency and transparency of our governmental institutions through amicus curiae as well as by drafting legislative reforms.  

Mooting

Upper year students can take part in the Phillip C. Jessup international Moot. The Jessup Moot, organized by the by the International Law Students Association, is held in about 80 countries around the world. Over 1600 students from 300 institutes take part every year. 

First-year law students also participate in an internal moot court, based on Lon L. Fuller´s “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers”, first published in 1949 by the Harvard Law Review.  The videos of the 2009 moot court competition can be watched at the School’s Vimeo channel