Scholars Convene in Panama to Weigh Constitutional Law and Democracy
Yale Law School alumni from across the Americas and the Atlantic converged in Panama City in June for the 30th Seminario en Latinoamérica de Teoría Constitucional y Política, or SELA. Faculty in attendance from Yale Law School and 19 partnering institutions spent three days discussing papers written for the conference.
SELA 2026 opened with a session on race and democracy. Participants considered a paper on Black republicanism by Esteban Restrepo ’00 LLM, ’15 JSD, another on a psychological theory of racial justice by Adilson Moreira, and one on Black constitutionalism in Brazil by Wallace Corbo. As Tracy Robinson ’95 LLM noted, the choice to start SELA on this topic set the tone for the sessions to follow. The subsequent sessions included papers on the predicament of national judges facing transnational questions, on institutions that discipline the diffusion of legal norms, on the apparent decline in confidence in the capacity of constitutional democracy to attain its objectives, and on the use and reform of law in the face of rapid technological innovation.
Amrit Singh ’01, professor of practice and the founding director of NYU Law's Rule of Law Lab, delivered the Bo Burt keynote address. A human rights lawyer and expert on democracy and the rule of law, Singh gave a presentation about the legal tools her lab studies and deploys to defend democracy and the rule of law in the U.S. and globally. The Bo Burt keynote was created to honor Professor Robert H. Burt ’64 following his death in 2015. Burt, together with Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Owen M. Fiss, began visiting and working with students during the democratic transitions in Chile and Argentina during the mid-1980s. These students formed the backbone of what became SELA. Carlos Rosenkrantz ’87 LLM, ’89 JSD, now a minister on Argentina’s Supreme Court, credited Burt with having “tried the hardest to understand us South Americans.”
The other special session afforded attendees an opportunity to learn more about the challenges facing democracy in Central America. Emphasis was placed on Panama and Costa Rica, where SELA does not have any institutional partnerships. Álvaro Ramos Chaves, who served as president of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund in 2022, explained his decision to run for president of the country in 2026. Although he finished in second place in the February election with 33% of the vote, he did well enough to deny his rival a mandate for the platform she ran on, and he is planning to run again in the 2030 elections.
Salvador Sánchez González, a lawyer who runs the research arm of Panama’s Electoral Court, gave a technical presentation about his country’s Supreme Court tightrope walk between Chinese and U.S. interests in the administration of the ports near the Panama Canal. Dr. Lina Vega Abad devoted her presentation to the pro-democracy groups burgeoning from protests against recent mining concessions. Although the high Panamanian court ruled that both the Chinese port concessions and the mining concessions were unconstitutional and thus annulled them, the mining companies still sponsor soccer teams and cultural events while the Chinese companies have left.
SELA’s mission is to provide a platform for independent legal research by scholars committed to democracy and the rule of law in Latin America. The papers written for it form the substance of many graduate programs at Yale Law School’s partner schools and are regularly cited in judicial opinions. SELA is part of Yale Law School’s Latin American Legal Studies programs, which are headed by Daniel Markovits ’00, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law. In addition to SELA, the programs include the Owen Fiss Latin American Linkage Program, an informal law student exchange, and the Latin American Series, a speaker series.
