On April 27, 2020, Oscar Correas Vazquez, one of the most important representatives of Sociology and Theory of Law in Latin America, passed away. Vazquez was born in Córdoba, Argentina, and emigrated to Mexico City in the 1970s, where he over almost fifty years he built a brilliant career as a professor, researcher and author.
Within his prolific and stimulating intellectual trajectory, it is important to highlight the creation of a movement in critical socio-legal studies with a LatinAmerican matrix. This movement engendered, for instance, the Journal Crítica Juridica (Revista Crítica Juridica), as well as the organization of numerous congresses of Critical Law. With his capacity and outstanding personality, Vazquez has therefore contributed to training a generation of professors, researchers, and several operators in the legal world. What Professor Correas represents is indisputable, since he is not only one of the most brilliant, original, and fruitful Marxist theorists of law, but also one of the main sources of critical thinking in Latin America. Starting from antagonistic epistemic assumptions offered, on one hand, by Karl Marx, and on the other, by Hans Kelsen, he presents a strong criticism of modern law. And yet, by opposing the formal legal science of positivism, he defends a material legal science which is centered on normative content as a consolidation of socioeconomic phenomena.
Through the extent and solidity of his proposals, he moves forward expressing interest in logicaldiscursive incursions that include both the sociopolitical criticism which seeks to demystify Kelsenian formalism and the analysis of indigenous law, legal pluralism, legal rationality and the teaching of law, human rights, and law policy, understood as “legal criticism”.
Imbued with a questioning, restless and controversial spirit, based on the eclecticism and complexity of his discursive arguments which are grounded on Sociology and Philosophy of Law, Correas dialogues with the Theory of Law, Semiology, Politics and Anthropology. Therefore, his theoreticalmethodological contribution to a social critique of law is associated with an epistemological contribution which confuses itself with a socio-discursive normative proposition.
In summary, for the development of Legal Sociology and for all those who share critical socio-legal thinking, Óscar Correas not only represents an original and scientific perspective from Latin America, but above all leaves us with an inspiring horizon, built on the seeds of rupture, transgression, and transformation.
António Carlos Wolkmer
(First published in RCSL Newsletter 2021(1), p. 2)
This page last updated 9 February 2025