Forum Latin America
Aims
The aim of the Max Planck Law Forum Latin America is to communicate across Latin America the work and activities of Max Planck Law as well as the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne). One of the main objectives of Max Planck Law is to connect with young researchers at doctoral and postdoctoral level, as well as legal researchers more generally. To this end, the forum will disseminate the various activities of Max Planck Law pertaining to Latin American law and society, such as workshops, seminars, symposia, research results, new international publications, etc. The forum will also promote diverse mechanisms of selection, exchange, and training for researchers, through scholarship programmes, summer schools, seminars, tandem groups, and other activities that enable the direct exchange of knowledge between researchers and Max Planck Law. Excellence is thereby guaranteed in selecting and connecting with Latin American scholars. In addition, the forum will stimulate growth in the legal and social sciences across both spaces through the cross-fertilization of perspectives, themes, and ways of meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Due to COVID-19, the inaugural conference originally scheduled to take place in Bogotá and Buenos Aires in March/April 2020 has been postponed until further notice.
Latest Event

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Past Events
30 June 2021, EU-Mercosur FTA: Economic Insights and IP Legal Reflections
Organised by:
The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (MPI) & The Smart IP for Latin America Initiative (SIPLA)
Online Zoom Session
Dr Roxana Blasetti
Member of the Observatory and the “Smart IP for Latin America” (SIPLA).
Affiliated Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich; at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Industrial and Economic Law (CEIDIE), University of Buenos Aires, and at Latin American University in Social Sciences (FLACSO)
Professor Dr Mohamed Amal
Associate professor of International Economics and International Business at the Regional University of Blumenau (FURB) and University of the Itajaí Valley (UNIVALI) Brazil.
Main research fields: Foreign Direct Investment, Multinational Companies and Regional Integration.
26 April 2021, Latin American Lawfare
Online discussion of the new book “Bienvenidos al Lawfare” from Zaffaroni, Caamaño, and Vegh Weis. The event is part of a series meant to bring together the researchers in the MPL network whose background or scholarly interests are connected with Latin America. This community of researchers in the MPL network shall benefit from these contacts and exchanges as the Directors make plans to launch the Max Planck Law — Forum Latin America in the coming year. This book discussion took place in Spanish.
21 September 2021, Argentina’s Criminal Law Migrations: Translation, Struggle, and Innovation 1880–1955
Professor Máximo Sozzo: 21 September 2021 // 15.00 CET
The Argentine reception of positivist ideas was extraordinary, giving rise to a profusion of intellectual outputs particularly between the 1880s and 1930s. This was unlike the rest of Latin America. The present research project developed by Sozzo and Núñez aims at contributing to the understanding of this metamorphasis of knowledge, with an emphasis on how the circulation of ideas across national borders played a role in them. The traditional view of the processs of importing ideas on crime and punishment focuses on developments from the North to the South, assumes the dependence of peripheral contexts on central contexts, and tends to present these processes as mere adoptions. This prevents the observation of the dynamics of adaptation and rejection that are also involved in these processes and in the framework of which, in some cases, significant innovations are generated by local authors in relation to local problems and contexts. In contrast, this research intends to restore this complexity to the journeys from North to South — between different European scenarios and the Argentine scenario — of the question of crime during this period. This operation does not prevent us from recognizing the centrality of dependence but implies understanding it as a less simple process than has often been thought in this area of research.
Máximo Sozzo is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina). He is also there Director of the Master in Criminology and Director of the Crime and Society Program. He is Adjunct Professor of the School of Justice at Queensland University of Techonology (Brisbane, Australia). He is the Coordinator of the GT (2016-2019): “Penal System and Social Change” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences.
Discussants: Jorge A. Núñez and Agustín Casagrande
Jorge A. Núñez is an assistant researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina) and professor of Argentine Social History at the University of Buenos Aires. His research topic is prison reform in Argentina in the 20th century. He is co-director, together with José Daniel Cesano, of the Revista de Historia de las Prisiones and the Colección Criminología Argentina.
Agustín Casagrande is an affiliate resesarcher at MPI-Frankfurt and assists in the coordination of the Max Planck Law Forum Latin America.
18 November 2021, The Environmental Human Rights Framework in Latin America and the Caribbean
Speaker: Dr. Mario G. Aguilera Bravo (MPI-Halle) 15.00 – 15.30 CET
Commentator. Prof. Dr. Dirk Hanschel (MPI- Halle) 15.30 – 15.45 pm CET
Q&A: 16.45 – 16.00 CET:
The lecture focuses on the recent development of a regional framework of environmental human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean based on the ‘Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation, and Access to Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean’ (Escazú Agreement) and the American Convention on Human Rights. It will be argued that despite not being explicitly bound together, both instruments share a similar approach towards the protection of environmental rights. In addition, it will describe the main feature of the regional framework, namely its pillar on fairness conditions for vulnerable persons and groups. Finally, it will be discussed how such development contributes to current sustainable development debates beyond the regional scope.