MEXICO CITY — In the precincts of Coyoacán near to where Leon
Trotsky caught the business end of an ice pick sprawls a monument
to Big Government and the delirium of National Greatness if not
to any certifiable species of conservatism. This is the “Behemoth
U.” of Russell Kirk’s nightmares, an endless vulgar-Marxist bull
session 200,000 voices strong in a jumble of boxy buildings
consecrated by and to “The Big Three” — not Detroit carmakers
but extravagant muralists of high-church Stalinism and neo-pagan
chic — Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco. Here Lillian Hellman’s heart
could have been at home. Certainly not the City College of New
York, this is UNAM, Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México.
Depending on the audience, UNAM’s publicity machine presents
alternative founding dates. For those (especially those with fat
checkbooks) who might cherish the Permanent Things, UNAM says it
is the second-oldest university in the Western Hemisphere,
founded in 1551 — when Madrid sent over the charter for the
Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. For those who consider
the Spanish and Catholic heritage a yoke of oppression, the
university traces its origin to 1910 and the ignition of the
Mexican Revolution. The latter account is more accurate, since
President Benito Juárez and his anti-clerical Reforma in
1867 had shuttered forever the old Pontifical National
University. The true UNAM opened in 1910 during the dying light
of the Díaz dictatorship’s “positivism” and the dawning rays of
Mexican-style Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other radical
intellectual fads hanging onto the tumbrels of the Revolution.
Behemoth universities allow, like exotic hothouse plants,
occasional exceptions to radical and socialist conformity. Milton
Friedman and Saul Bellow were tolerated for a while at
Wisconsin-Madison, while California-Berkeley permitted the
conservative scholar George Lenczowski to thrive. William F.
Buckley, Jr., and Octavio Paz studied at UNAM but did not
graduate. In more characteristic fashion, José López Portillo and
a succession of other big-government Mexican presidents and party
bosses graduated and launched their careers from the UNAM law
school.
In UNAM’s center for juridical research toils a youthful, gentle,
but animated scholar of classical and Spanish literature,
philology, economics, and Roman law, Juan Javier del Granado. He
is circumspect about his work. “If they” — the university
establishment — “knew what I was up to, they might hang me from
a lamppost.”
What Del Granado is up to is an attempt to rehabilitate, after
centuries in the intellectual demimonde, Latin American
jurisprudence. Del Granado is a political refugee from Bolivia,
where his family for centuries has been prominent in literary
circles and the Church. He cannot bear to live under the regime
of Evo Morales, and so for the time being, he is plotting a sort
of counter-subversion in the shadow of the masterpiece murals of
Social Realism.
He speaks with the enthusiasm of a detoured pilgrim dizzy from
the trek to what he mistook for Compostela, or maybe of a
Christian missionary to Borneo, or of St. Paul on the Areopagus.
“Everything wrong with law in Latin America,” he says, surveying
the Ciudad Universitaria with a believer’s gleam in his
eye, “began here.”
Whatever seeds he plants in Mexico he will have to return from
the United States to cultivate. In the fall he will begin an
appointment in the genial setting of George Mason University in
the Washington, D.C. suburbs. He explains that Washington offers
an indispensable base for Latin American legal studies because
the Library of Congress houses by far the best collection of his
region’s legal books, exceeding anything available in Mexico or
South America.
Del Granado is trained in both the Hispano-Catholic
humanist/natural law tradition and the University of Chicago
law-and-economics school. He maintains that they are compatible,
even meant for one another. In terms that lawyers probably will
understand better than this writer and other members of the
laity, he says that Latin America suffers from an emphasis on
“public law” with government as the central player, to the near
exclusion of “private law” mediating between private
parties.
“The private sector,” he writes, “cannot exist in a vacuum.
Private law enables the private sector to be the main driver of
the economy. Understanding how a system of private law works is
relevant for economic liberalization. Unfortunately, Latin
American countries liberalized and privatized their economies in
the 1990s, forgetting that their legal systems had been
socialized and constitutionalized during much of the 20th
century. Arguing for a return to Roman law is the best way to
introduce law and economics into the civil law tradition and to
reprivatize Latin America’s ailing legal system.”
The Bolivian scholar is quick to say “Yanqui go home” when it
comes to United States regulatory law. “Latin Americans look at
U.S. regulatory law as the most significant legal advance that
can be imported from the North. Even Richard Posner now says we
need a little more regulation. Nothing could be further from the
truth! Regulatory law is an aberration of United States history.
The solution to the market problems we are facing (even in the
U.S.) is to improve private legal institutions, not introduce new
regulation. Financial and securities markets, as well as the
corporate sector, may have suffered from an undue degree of
opacity. This is what Henry Manne has been saying for years, and
no one listened to him.”
Del Granado has many comrades in his school of thought, organized
in the Latin American and Caribbean Law and Economics
Association, known by its Spanish acronym, ALACDE. Those who want
to delve deeper into the work of this organization and its
members may find a wealth of information in English at this
website.
Roger Fontaine, who directed Latin American policy for Ronald
Reagan in the National Security Council, now teaches at the
Institute of World Politics. Every semester he begins his
regional studies course with the world-weary observation: “Latin
America is not a place. It’s a pathology.”
Juan Javier del Granado dreams of transforming Latin America into
a place — a place where foundations of law as understood by
Cicero and Aquinas can foster prosperity and ordered liberty.
(Mr. Duggan is a visiting professor in the Estado de México
campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey, one of the participating
institutions in ALACDE.)
