Legal Theory Festival - Annual Lecture
Location:
Usha Kasera Lecture Theatre
Old College
Date/time
Mon 1 June 2026
17:00-19:00
This talk explores how legal theory can move beyond a purely critical position to reclaim law’s constructive possibilities. While contemporary analysis often treats authoritarian turns as moments of crisis or exception, I argue that they are neither novel nor anomalous but follow recurring patterns across historical, economic, political and geographic contexts. Against this backdrop, law remains a vital, if contested, terrain. International and domestic regimes continue to structure our every day lives and still enable forms of justice, mobilization, and redistributive claims in a world where the exercise of unilateral power seems to be the rule. Meaningful transformation demands we engage law from within: foregrounding its political economy, interrogating its limits, exposing its contradictions, and mobilizing its doctrinal, procedural, and institutional force to imagine a different, possible world.
About the speaker
Helena Alviar García is a Colombian SJD from Harvard Law School and lawyer from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She served as Dean of Los Andes Law School where she also held tenure as full professor (profesora titular), teaching courses on Property, Public law, legal theory and feminist theory. She has been a visiting professor in universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States including Harvard Law School, University of Pennsylvania, Università di Torino, University of Miami, Universidad de Puerto Rico and University of Wisconsin in Madison. Notably, she was the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 2017; the Bok Distinguished Visiting Professor at Penn Law School in 2015 and the Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2008.