In this episode, Julie and Jed debrief Chile’s vote in September to reject a newly drafted constitution with Samuel Issacharoff, Sergio Verdugo, and Camila Vergara.
In 2020, Chilean voters demanded a new constitution to replace the one written in 1980 under the military dictatorship. But in 2022, Chilean voters rejected the new constitution drafted by political independents elected to a gender-balanced and indigenous-inclusive assembly. Why? What was in the constitution that many described as the most progressive constitution written to date? And what does the vote say about the prospects for constitutional reform in Chile and beyond?
Samuel Issacharoff is Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of law and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts (2015). His research ranges from civil procedure to American and comparative constitutional law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, and is a co-author of the Law of Democracy casebook.
Sergio Verdugo is an Assistant Professor of Law at the IE Law School in Spain, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law. He is also an Editor of the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON) and the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S). Before joining the IE University, he was the Director of the Center for Constitutional Justice of the Universidad del Desarrollo School of Law, Chile.
Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her writings about social movements and the constitutional process in Chile have appeared in New Left Review and Jacobin.