Executive Summary
The chief objective of the School of Law is to provide the best legal education and, thereby, to help establishing a reliable, just, and high quality legal system in Argentina. Since its inception, the School of Law has stressed the importance of changing the nature of legal studies in countries that, like Argentina, follow both the Civil Law system and the doctrinal conception of legal scholarship, going back to the reception of Roman Law in Europe. The core of this change is to break down the disciplinary and idiomatic barriers isolating legal scholarship in search of theoretical tools available in fields like Philosophy, Economics, Finance, Political Science, and History.
The School was founded in 1996 after two years of organizational work conducted by Guido Pincione and Horacio Spector. More than fifty people at Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Chicago, Chicago-Kent, Cardozo, Hofstra, and Northwestern, including deans, administrators, and faculty, were interviewed. The information gathered served to found the first bilingual, research school of law in Argentina.
In March 1996 the president of the University named Horacio Spector (John Simon Guggenheim Fellow 1993) as the first dean of the School of Law. A professional board was established to advise the dean. It is chaired by Juan Cambiaso and formed by prominent members of the Buenos Aires and New York City bars: http://www.utdt.edu/departamentos/derecho/posgrado/ma-dye-cons.htm
The School offers two educational programs: the law degree program ("Abogacía") and the LLM program in Law and Economics ("Maestría en Derecho y Economía"). The former is a full-time five-year program. It uses the case method and simulation techniques in various courses. It also features moot court competitions, intensive training in legal writing, and externship programs. The latter is a part-time, two-year program, addressed to lawyers and law-related graduates. It provides three areas of specialization: Business Law, Law & Finance, and Law & Public Policy. In both programs students may take courses in other schools or divisions of the University.
Prestigious scholars who publish their research work in international journals and publishing houses compose the School’s full-time faculty. It is complemented with a distinguished group of adjunct instructors, who have made important contributions to legal doctrine in Argentina. In addition, renowned foreign scholars are invited to teach courses in both the undergraduate and the graduate programs. Visiting professors typically submit unpublished works in the weekly research seminar or in special symposia. The volume Rights, Equality, and Liberty. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Law and Philosophy Lectures 1995-1997 was recently published by Kluwer Academic Publishers: http://www.wkap.nl/book.htm/0-7923-6059-1
Revista Argentina de Teoría Jurídica is a bilingual, electronic journal in legal theory edited by the law students. It lends a contribution to interdisciplinary legal research, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world: http://www.utdt.edu/departamentos/derecho/publicaciones/rtj1/primeraspaginas/index.htm
At present the School has exchange programs with seven schools of law: Northwestern, Arizona State, Southwestern, Chicago-Kent, Texas at Austin, Pompeu Fabra (Spain), and ITAM (Mexico). The number of such programs increases year after year. Other foreign campuses are available to UTDT law students for specific purposes, like writing a monograph or making non-degree studies.
