Harvard Law School – University of Chile Exchange Program
Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) Regional Office, in cooperation with Harvard Law School, offers an excellent study abroad opportunity for HLS students in Santiago, Chile. This study abroad exchange initiative allows HLS students to directly enroll for up to ten credits at the University of Chile School of Law while also providing a Harvard University–organized orientation, internship program, and other special activities. As part of the exchange, a law student from the University of Chile (Universidad de Chile or UCH) spends a semester at HLS. Please see UCH Student Testimonies for more information about this experience.
The University of Chile is the country’s oldest and largest public institution of higher education, and has more than 23,000 students at its 13 campuses located in downtown Santiago. It has several renowned programs including the Center for Human Rights, the Center for Environmental Law, and the Center for the Study of Law and Information, and past program participants have recommended mining, telecom, and human rights law classes as particularly challenging and worthwhile. The law school’s faculty is made up of practicing lawyers as well as professional academics, lending course material substantive practical elements alongside of theoretical context.
Chile provides an extraordinary vantage point from which to study law, particularly in the comparative Latin American context. Significant social debates in Chile are currently making world headlines: from human rights abuses to increasingly active demands from indigenous groups. At the same time, Chile is a stable democracy with one of the strongest economies in Latin America. It has recently signed free trade agreements with the United States (the only country in South America besides Peru to have done so), the European Union, and numerous Asian countries.
With a well-known history of human rights violations, particularly during the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, Chile is now pioneering efforts to litigate or otherwise address its past, along with current and timely human rights cases and disputes, particularly with regard to natural resources, practice of democracy, and national development. Chile also offers a unique opportunity to explore economic development in Latin America. Often considered a success story by the international community, Chile welcomes foreign business and investment with its highly privatized industries and liberal trade policy. However, these business interests often collide with the rights of the rural and indigenous communities. Such conflicts of interest may provide another interesting topic of study for law students.
There is a strong international presence in Chile, and especially in Santiago, which is home to numerous well-known human rights organizations, advocacy groups, and research projects—many of which are tied to world-class universities, NGOs, and IGOs. For many, Chile has served as a fascinating laboratory for economic and political development in Latin America. The economic, cultural, and social developments of the past few decades have woven a history that is complex, textured, and controversial, resulting in an increasingly modern country that still retains many aspects of a more traditional society.
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