About the Center

The CIDS seeks to promote and develop socio-legal research in order to contribute to the production of contextualized and informed legal knowledge about the functioning of the institutions and their effects; and to contribute to the development of institutional and legally informed social science.

In 2020, the project for the creation of a socio-legal research center was approved by the Adolfo Ibáñez University, formally inaugurating it on May 25, 2021 .

The inspiration for CIDS is found in international interdisciplinary law research movements, such as the Law and Society movement, which emerged in the United States law schools in the 1960s, the Law in Context movement in the United Kingdom, and in general in the ideas behind ​​the Socio-Legal Studies of the 70s.

In a nutshell, all these previous movements have managed to transform the legal research landscape towards a more empirical approach to law and have motivated the creation of centers such as CIDS, allowing law schools to connect and integrate their research with the work of social scientists, historians, sociologists, public policies designers, or any other professional interested in the work of the law.

Especially in Chile, the CIDS arises from people’s mistrust of the secrecy and self-reference of traditional legal research, whose audience is generally limited to the environment influenced by the culture of the legal profession, often making collaboration with other disciplines difficult. This outcome tends to produce restricted research and lack of knowledge on how legal institutions work, leaving out the context in which they function and the effects they produce.