Juan Bautista Alberdi was born in San Miguel de Tucumán on August 29, 1810 and died in France on June 19, 1884. In honor of his birth we celebrate the Lawyer’s Day. In some initial course of law school, we have all studied his Bases, published shortly after the battle of Caseros. A persuasive document on the relevance and content of the draft constitution that Alberdi (from its second edition) included as an appendix to the book, and which was the main source of the National Constitution of 1853. This document was also a complete political program of sustainable progress (with famous slogans such as “to govern is to populate”), and the project included notable advances in constitutional dogmatics (two examples: express reception of the legislative delegation, something that was only normatively received in the country 150 years later; and distinction between the scope of reasonable regulation of a right and the scope of unconstitutional “restriction”, 100 years ahead of the protection of the “essential content” of the right by the Fundamental Law of Germany).
Equally or more interesting are his other writings guided by less circumstantial aims, such as Sistema económico y rentístico de la Confederación Argentina (1854), a kind of explanation and deepening of the foundation of the Constitution and in particular of the economic rights and freedoms contained therein; perhaps the first national book of economic analysis of law. Or also El crimen de la guerra (1870), an advanced plea in favor of global peace of nations founded on trade, almost a century before the European Union was established with a similar inspiration. Or even “The omnipotence of the State is the negation of individual freedom” (1880 conference at the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires), a legal, economic, cultural and philosophical examination of the causes that facilitate the emergence of totalitarian governments. His work includes many other books and essays on law, history, economics and literature.
And there is also his first work, less guided by politics and perhaps more focused on law itself. There he offers some reflections that can be useful for thinking about professional practice. His Preliminary Fragment to the Study of Law (1837) is a general exposition of what today we would call an introduction to law, theory of law, general principles of law or philosophy of law. In the Preface he goes into depth about his personal motivations for studying law. He points out that it was with various readings (such as Lerminier and Savigny) that he was able to “leave[ar] of conceiving law as a collection of written laws”, and to note that law “was nothing less than the moral law of the harmonious development of social beings”, that is, “a living phenomenon that needed to be studied in the organic economy of the State”. Law “like physics, had to become experimental; and thus acquire an interest and animation that it did not have in written texts, nor in abstract doctrines”. Alberdi thus confesses that “[e]”The law then took on for me an attraction equal to that of the most spiciest phenomena of nature.” And he sentenced: “Those who, thinking that the practice of interpreting laws is nothing more than the practice of making shoes, devote themselves to jurisprudence without ability, without vocation, should know that they are taking on the saddest attitude that can be had in the world.”
In times when the automation of tasks, the fluidity of communications and artificial intelligence greatly simplify part of the work of lawyers, it seems more necessary to maintain and deepen this attitude of approaching professional practice: not as something mechanical based on a collection of laws, regulations, rulings and contracts, but as a fundamentally human, experimental, living practice in the truest sense of the word, focused on commerce, exchanges, relationships between people, and the harmonious development of society. More than ever, clients need lawyers with technical and trained criteria, but also prudent, commercial and practical, who accompany them in their projects and work on law as something alive. Or as Alberdi would say in a famous motto of the Fragment, keeping in mind that “knowing laws is not knowing law.”
