Carlos Cossio (San Miguel de Tucuman, February 3, 1903 - Buenos Aires, August 24, 1987) was a militant university reformer, jurist, lawyer, legal philosopher and Argentinian professor. One of his most important works is the concept of the Egological Theory of Law.
Biography
Cossio had his primary and secondary education in Tucumán, then moved to Buenos Aires to study Law at the University of Buenos Aires, where he joined the university reform movement, being one of the leaders of the Student Center. He completed his doctoral thesis on the topic of "The University Reform and the Problem of the New Generation," published in 1927.
From 1934 to 1948, he taught at the National University of La Plata where he began to develop his theories on egological law. In 1948, he took over the Chair of Philosophy of Law at the University of Buenos Aires, where he finished the definition of his original conception of law. He was surrounded by a large group of followers and disciples, including Ambrose Lucas Gioja, Julio Cesar Cueto Rua, Genaro Carrió, José Vilanova, Daniel Herrendorf, Enrique Aftalion, and Carlos Spini, who formed the "Argentina Legal School." During this time, his recognition and prestige reached a level no one had imagined. His definition of law as "interference intersubjective behaviors" brought him into a controversy with Hans Kelsen, creator of the Pure Theory of Law, at the same law school in Buenos Aires in 1949.
In 1956, he was forced to leave his position as chair by the military government of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu because of his alleged sympathy for the Peronists, and it was only in 1973 when he could return thanks to the efforts of his friend and disciple, Julio Raffo. The military and its supporters largely destroyed the strength of the "Argentina Law School" and its potential for expansion. The liberal bourgeoisie and the political right never forgave their devotion to their independent politics and the fact that they never supported a political party, instead ardently defending their ideas and proposals. Cossio did respond to an official survey on the then possible constitutional reform that materialized in 1949. While many of his colleagues didn't comment, instead distancing themselves during the military dictatorships of General Juan Carlos Ongania and Jorge Rafael Videla, the old professor spoke out against the regime and condemned the human rights violations.
His major work is Ideology and Law, developed from the concept of phenomenology of judgment, the judge's process of interpretation and understanding of the law, and the ideological and class backgrounds of liberal capitalist law. In his early thesis in the publication The Law, Cossio explained that what judges do affects everyone and that what judges do remains hidden, both for themselves and for those who are subject to their decisions. "We are all involved in what judges do, good or bad, and not just for what might be perceived at first glance", Cossio says, "but much more because all of them, day by day and hour by hour, they do something for the right wing or the left wing, and also for democracy or totalitarianism, gravitating over the social life specifically, as agents of the law". Those judges often ignore the scope of their duties "because the said contribution being something more vivid than a thought, is on the basis of the situation that those agents of the law defend, a situation inevitably referred to the leading social structures".
Cossio accepted the Pure Theory of Law of Hans Kelsen, and made it an important part of his own theory. However, the tension between the two visions was always present. Cossio accepted positive law, but did not accept the mechanistic normativism as the object of legal science. Cossio distinguished himself by demonstrating that law should be understood and interpreted by a theory of knowledge with respect to human behavior in intersubjective interference. It was not just about ideal legal subjects (normativism mechanistic) but about people, real human beings: "the law as human behavior."
Cossio's work asserted that, "The judge looks at the law not as conclusive and finished, but as something that is constantly making its living character of human life."
His work, unlike his skeptics', was translated into French, English, the former Yugoslavic language (now Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin), German, Polish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages. In 1986 he received the Konex Award for his development of the Humanities in Argentina.