Title: Merit and kindness: Making a career in the legal administration of Chili (1974-2016)
Abstract: There are few studies of the public administration in Chili. The present article examines the court employees who oversaw investigations in the Chilean judicial system between the 1970s and the 2000s, with particular attention given the illegal but at the time very widespread practice of delegating authority. Indeed, these agents, who only entered the institution by cooptation, often took the place of a judge. I consider the informal economy of social relations and its relationship to the recruitment and promotion of officials in trial courts, where the proceedings exclusively took place in writing and were shielded from the public gaze. Legal professionals sometimes played only a secondary role in these proceedings, particularly in criminal cases. If one is to understand the concrete ways in which legal proceedings took place and the issues at stake in the reforms implemented in the early 2000s, one must thus consider the role played by these “little” officials. Examining the careers of these employees supports the argument that the Chilean legal administration lacked any institutional and socially prestigious model of professional skill and probity in the period under consideration.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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