The war on drugs and the challenges to liberal legality

Speaker: Professor Alvaro Santos (Georgetown University)
Chair: Professor Joanne Scott (UCL Laws)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA (BSB pending)

Current Legal Problems 2014-15

The dominant way of thinking about drug trafficking has relied on a law and order paradigm that regards drug use as a social problem and resorts to the criminalisation of production, distribution and consumption of narcotics as the solution. However, vigorous critiques of the prohibitionist policies and the recent legalisation of marijuana for recreational use in Colorado and Washington in the U.S. and in Uruguay have challenged this model.

This lecture challenges several assumptions of the law and order paradigm and it also raises some caution about the hopes of legalisation as a silver-bullet solution to the ills of drug trafficking. The lecture examines the constitutive role of law in illegality, the unnecessary connection between illegality and violence, and the unwarranted hopes pinned on the rule of law as a general solution.

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About the speaker

Alvaro Santos is Professor of Law at Georgetown University and Co-Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS) for 2014-2015. He teaches and writes in the areas of international trade, economic development, drug policy and transnational labor law. His recent scholarship critically examines the law and order model for the regulation of illicit drug markets, analyzes the relationship between illegality and violence, and explores alternatives to prohibitionist policies.

Professor Santos regularly teaches at Harvard’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) and Georgetown’s WTO Academy. He has taught at the University of Texas, Tufts University, Melbourne Law School, and the University of Turin-ILO Master’s program. Professor Santos serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Law and Development Review, and the Latin American Journal of International Trade Law. He holds S.J.D. and LL.M. degrees from Harvard Law School, and a LL.B. from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).