When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Harvard Law School SJD candidate Nicolás Parra-Herrera and Universidad de los Andes law professor Jorge González-Jácome “missed the coffee chats between classes—the spontaneous exchanges about our research, readings, and ideas,” Parra-Herrera says. Searching for creative outlets, they started a podcast where they would reframe legal issues through movies, television, and books. What began as a simple way to connect soon had educational value: amid other ways of reimagining legal education during COVID, the podcast soon had found its way onto syllabi. The podcast El Derecho por fuera del Derecho (“The Law Outside the Law”) is but one example of the way that market forces, global uncertainty, and other changes call for transformation and innovation in the ways that schools impart the law.
The podcast became both a tool for those casually interested in new valences on the law as well as “assigned listening” in different law schools. Classics like the film 12 Angry Men were useful for discussing “leadership, evidence, democracy, and negotiation theory,” says Parra-Herrera, alongside less obvious choices, like the film Lost in Translation, “where we examine questions in comparative law and legal theory, alongside more personal and existential reflections.”
The pandemic, along with other transformative events like the emergence of generative AI, have called for new ways of thinking about the way we train lawyers. In this story, we speak to three individuals about how—and why—legal education is evolving in different Latin American settings. First, we speak to Cristián Villalonga Torrijo, associate professor at the law school at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, about the expansion of legal education in Chile, with a move toward increasing enrollment and a need for increasing differentiation; then we speak to Eleonora Lozano, dean of the law school at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, about the rollout of an expansive curricular redesign. In between, we take a detour into professional education and how judges learn, speaking to Marvin Carvajal, formerly the director of the judicial school in Costa Rica. Throughout each segment, we learn about how schools are interacting with a changing world that requires new types of lawyers.
Finding law’s humanistic roots
Until about 1980, there were only five law schools in Chile, each with a rote memorization–style curriculum largely set by a single university. Today, there are more than 50, says Villalonga. Each new program offers something different—from specialty clinics to their own exam certifying bar preparedness.
In a chapter in the book Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies, volume 1, Villalonga documents the dramatic expansion of legal education that occurred over the past half century in Chile. The military dictatorship of the 1970s through 1990 ushered in a “free market logic” into higher education, creating competition and increasing enrollment across the board, he says in the chapter. By 1993, there were 25 law schools.
In the post-authoritarian period, Villalonga writes, the “restoration of democracy” and an “economic boom” brought about further transformation: in the courts, social services, and the administrative state. This required more lawyers. As new law schools opened their doors, traditional law schools also increased enrollment. “Consequently, the number of law graduates grew exponentially. From 197 admitted to practice in 1977 to 815 in 1997 and 3,487 in 2015,” Villalonga writes.
Today, Villalonga says, the expansion of legal education has led to such an influx of law students that the degree’s cache may be waning.
An article by Javier Wilenmann, Diego Gil, and Samuel Tschorne likewise notes that this period was marked by a professionalization of Chilean legal academia. In neighboring countries like Mexico and Costa Rica, the authors write, law school courses are taught predominantly by practicing lawyers who teach on the side. Competition between newer law schools seeking grant funding and ways to differentiate their offerings spurred transformation in Chile, creating a new professorial class.
Today, Villalonga says, the expansion of legal education has led to such an influx of law students that the degree’s cache may be waning. Professionals have complained that there are too many law graduates and that legal training is low quality in some law schools, he says. Because each law school administers its own exam to certify bar admission, too, some have found law graduates transfer to second- or third-tier schools when they fail to pass exams at first-tier institutions. About a decade ago, this situation led calls for a national exam, but such a demand has currently faded.
Even as such critiques exist, Villalonga says, increased regulation and complexity still demand lawyers. In an interview reflecting on his chapter and what has happened since its publication in 2020, Villalonga says, “There is a sensation that there is room for lawyers because governance and regulatory aspects of society require well-trained lawyers in several areas, for example, compliance, data protection, anti-discrimination, labor law, and intellectual property.” He adds: “Due to the proliferation of regulation of the market and the state, litigation has expanded, and the law has emerged more consequential in recent decades.”
With the increase in law schools and students, there has likewise been a need to further differentiate—in terms of both job candidates and legal institutions. This has, in turn, led to more “well-tailored master’s degrees focused on specific areas of law,” Villalonga says, as well as “short-term certificates in subjects like data protection.”
You need a kind of value-oriented and humanistic approach to rigorously understand the basics of legal institutions and moral reasoning, first, before you specialize.
Cristián Villalonga Torrijo, associate professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
“It used to be possible to get a law degree, then get a job,” Villalonga says. Now, lawyers in Chile—as they are around the world—are finding themselves needing not only additional certifications but also alternative degrees on top of JDs, such as MBAs and MPPs, in order to stand out.
Likewise, “law schools … are looking for specific areas to get a kind of competitive advantage. For example, some of those schools are increasing focus in business. Others are increasing focus in labor law, immigration. Especially in smaller law schools or those that are second or third tier, … they have the flexibility to differentiate and also the impetus,” Villalonga says. For instance, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez has developed a strong focus on corporate issues and the Universidad Diego Portales on criminal procedure.
Reflecting on legal education in the wake of the pandemic and generative AI, Villalonga says, “I think there’s a general consensus we can’t follow a kind of encyclopedic legal education of the mid-twentieth century anymore.” Instead, he says, “You need to organize legal education toward skills—critical thinking, problem-solving, legal writing and research, and moral character.” This is especially true for educating young people, as Villalonga does, since law is an undergraduate degree. “I think there’s a mistake in legal education, and that mistake is to reduce law to a technical knowledge. You need a kind of value-oriented and humanistic approach to rigorously understand the basics of legal institutions and moral reasoning, first, before you specialize,” he says.
Teaching baby judges
Many countries in Latin America have judicial academies where would-be judges and court employees train for the profession and current judicial officials receive professional education. Networks like the Ibero-American Network of Judicial Schools and the Judicial Training Center for Central America and the Caribbean coordinate between the schools, helping to strengthen programming and share best practices.
Costa Rica’s judicial academy is one of the oldest in the region, officially founded in 1981, though formal judicial training began in the 1960s. When Marvin Carvajal started his tenure as director of the Costa Rican judicial college in 2006, he says that the school was very focused on professional education for the current judiciary. But it’s not enough, he says, to simply invest in working judges. “We of course need to have programs to educate judges on changes in regulations and so on, but if we don’t invest in the ‘baby judges,’ we will always be obliged to be working to update judges who never got that initial training,” Carvajal explains.
In the first few years of his tenure, Carvajal helped design a new one-year program for aspiring judges, which formally launched in 2010. In the first six months, students learn substance and logistics—both taking courses in law as well as learning “how to conduct a hearing and other judicial actions,” Carvajal says, as well as “the attitudes and values that are necessary for a judge in a democratic environment.” In these first six months, judges are also asked to practice their decision-making in different real-world scenarios. “They’re not real cases, so no one gets hurt,” Carvajal says. After half a year, judges rotate through courts as interns. They then spend three months in a rural court working under what Carvajal calls a “model judge”; then they spend two months in a specialized court, such as civil, family, labor, or criminal. In the last month, would-be judges work in an appellate court.
During his time with the school in Costa Rica, Carvajal also worked with the regional center for Central America and the Caribbean, where he assisted in “horizontal cooperation” and sharing of resources. Today, that time learning how to best train judges has proven valuable for Carvajal, who is now a partner at Alta specializing in public law, as he understands the particular “social and political dynamics of the court.” He hopes the one-year training program for “baby judges” continues to have an effect, helping to build out a corps of judges with more “empathy” and a “wide appreciation for the diversity of the country.”
Designing a curriculum for global lawyers
What type of education is required to prepare practice-ready lawyers to tackle the world’s most difficult problems? In 2024, the law school at the Universidad de los Andes began rolling out a new curriculum designed to answer that question. Rather than simply transmitting knowledge, the program is structured around developing competencies. According to Dean Lozano, this shift takes place in a broader context: the Colombian Ministry of Education has encouraged curriculum adjustments, and several programs at the university were already begun moving in this direction. This has created a favorable environment for deeper conversations—ones that allow the school to make explicit a long-standing teaching philosophy rooted in the use of active methodologies and a strong commitment to experiential learning.
The curriculum—which is gradually being implemented over the next four years—“reflects a new philosophy of legal education centered on real-world impact, interdisciplinary learning, and student agency,” she adds. Crucially, it will help students respond to “pressing societal and legal challenges,” such as structural inequality in Colombia, through project-based learning, simulations, and clinical practice.
[This new course of study will help] students understand comparative legal systems and prepare for an increasingly interconnected legal landscape.
Eleonora Lozano, dean of the law school at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia
“It’s important to note that our law school had not undergone a deep curricular reform since 1997,” says Dean Lozano. She continues:
The profession has changed, and so has the faculty. The context now is radically different: today, we have 43 full-time professors—nearly all with doctoral degrees—around 120 adjunct professors, and approximately 1,300 students across undergraduate and graduate levels. This growth and complexity demanded a thorough transformation of our curriculum.
Employing what the faculty have called the “Transversal Axis of Experiential Legal Learning,” the new curriculum is split into three parts. Over the course of 10 semesters, students take “six sequential courses focused on hands-on, real-world legal education,” says Dean Lozano. First, they engage in projects, where they might work on policy reform, for instance; then, they take litigation courses, learning foundational knowledge like criminal law through moot courts and simulations; then they take legal clinics. The Universidad de los Andes currently offers five clinics: the Prison Legal Aid Clinic, the Migrant Legal Clinic, the Environmental and Public Health Legal Clinic, the Program for Action in Equality and Social Inclusion (PAIIS), and the Entrepreneurship and Business Legal Clinic.
This new course of study will “[help] students understand comparative legal systems and prepare for an increasingly interconnected legal landscape,” says Dean Lozano. Competencies like “legal reasoning, argumentation, and communication” and “ethics and citizenship” are emphasized. “We have also added new mandatory courses that address emerging legal fields—such as environmental justice, law and technology, and electronic commerce,” she adds. Under the previous curriculum, the law degree spanned 10 semesters. In contrast, the new program is designed to be completed in nine semesters, with the final semester intentionally structured to give students flexibility—whether to pursue a double major or begin integrating graduate-level studies.
As the university continues to implement the curricular changes, Dean Lozano is proud of how collaborative the substantive and pedagogical redesign has been. “This shared vision has strengthened our sense of academic community—students, faculty, and staff are united in a common project that is generating both local impact and international visibility,” she says. From the initial seed of the idea to today’s fruition, each step has involved multistakeholder input across faculty, students, and staff with transparent and participatory feedback mechanisms. “Ultimately, we believe legal education must move beyond the traditional lecture format,” she says. “It must prepare students to think critically, act ethically, and engage meaningfully with the complex legal challenges of the 21st century.”
