The collection “Lawyers: Rights and Politics” responds, in a general way, to the objective of constructing a testimonial corpus that would allow us to think about -through the personal experience of lawyers as social and political actors- the recent history of liberating movements and the human rights movement through a relationship that links the world of Rights, in the broadest sense, and the world of Politics.

In this way, the collection seeks to shed light on the recent history and historicity of notions of law and justice that are now present in social memory. It is indispensable to insist that the objectives of the collection orient themselves, at the same time, to the recuperation- through the obtained testimonies- of the identity and memory of the lawyers that were assassinated and disappeared by the state and extra-state repression.

In line with these objectives, we have designed a set of content that is addressed along two large axes. The first is necessarily chronological: to recuperate the professional and political experience of each interviewee from their first formative experiences up until the present. By focusing on testimonies of diverse life stories, the collection registers different experiences and connections with the world of militancy, illustrates different instances of organization, both political and corporative, in which legal professionals participated, and reflects the multiplicity of perspectives with which these professionals lived and thought about different occurrences and debates.

The second axis refers to a set of questions that underlay and orient the collection and that can be synthesized in the following manner: What conceptions of rights, justice, State, and subject are present in the juridical activity of our recent past? What are the implicit conceptions in the different juridical figures and strategies that are appealed to? What are the short and long term political implications of these conceptions? What are the debates (political and legal) that, in some way, mark the ”world of rights”? In short, what is the role of these actors in the construction of social Memory?

The collection brings together initially around twenty testimonies of lawyers that, in different contexts and through different practices, have maintained in the past and/or maintain in the present an active participation in the defense of human rights. The majority of them have defended social and/or political prisoners in different periods of the twentieth century. Others have been protagonists in organizational undertakings and diverse political, academic, and institutional administrations that have shaped the history of law and of the human rights movement.

It is necessary to note that excluded from this collection are the voices of those lawyers that responded in some way to the interests of the conservative right or the repression. The lawyers whose testimonies are included pertain to the diverse traditions of the left, Peronism, progressivism, and those of liberal thought that in some way played an important role in the history of the establishment of the inclusive framework of “universal human rights”.

The set of testimonies in this collection is accompanied by a documentary dossier that brings together an analytic bibliography on the subject matter and the period and a diverse array of documents, many of which were supplied by the interviewees. It also includes an Appendix that contains an outline and a set of general questions organized in thematic blocks. Both tools were used in preparation of the interviews.