Cesar Ramirez Salazar

Law; empire and colonialism; legal education; Latino/a/e/x studies; youth; diaspora; immigration; Latin America; Colombia; U.S.-South America relations; comparative law; criminal procedure; legal pluralism.

As an Anthropologist, I am interested in the production of knowledge and praxis, and their movement across time and space. My training in law and Anthropology motivated me to approach abstract jurisprudential debates and presuppositions about the role of legal institutions and law with skepticism. I am broadly interested in recentering legal knowledge and praxis as ethnographic objects of inquiry through sociocultural and linguistic anthropological theories and methods.

This line of study has led me to numerous research paths. First, I am interested in the production, socialization, and diffusion of legal knowledge and praxis. Within this line of inquiry, I am currently researching Latin American, European, and Latino/a/e/x Legal Graduates pursuing legal training and professional opportunities in the U.S. I am also interested in what law schools at sites of the production and reproduction of legal knowledge reveal about transnational knowledge-production hierarchies. I also inquired about what legal education evinces regarding globalization and its disjunctures across different historical periods.  

Second, I have also studied the flow of legal knowledge and practice through the conceptual lens of Legal Transplants, particularly in Criminal Procedure, Comparative Law, Evidence Law, Constitutional Law, and Evidentiary Reasoning. I have researched criminal justice reforms throughout Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I researched the legal transplantation of the evidentiary standard of proof, "beyond a Reasonable Doubt," into Colombian criminal procedure. I focused on how local legal actors transplanted and mobilized different jurisprudential and epistemological theories of standards of evidence across the transnational legal field. 

Third, I collaborate on research examining lawyers' roles in producing knowledge and praxis for protecting the environment, as well as their relationships with Latin American Indigenous, Black, and Peasant communities. My research in this area has focused primarily on Colombia and Ecuador; yet, I have also collaborated with scholars and activists in Peru and Brazil. On the one hand, I have researched how lawyers conceptualize their role and the conceptual frameworks they deploy in discussions of the environment and human and more-than-human relations. I have also examined how lawyers reproduce and challenge theories of those relations. Furthermore, I have collaborated with scholars and activists pursuing their research and agendas. I have also researched the uses of constitutional law by lawyers and Indigenous, Black, and Peasant communities within these discussions.