Chairs:

• Rene Urueña – rf.uruena21@uniandes.edu.co
• Armin von Bogdandy – sekreavb@mpil.de
• Aminta Ossom – aossom@law.harvard.edu

SPEAKERS

Carlos Fernando	Matute González
Eimys	Ortiz Hernandez
Janas	Witold
Julián	Gutierrez Martinez

This panel explores how Latin America’s project of transformative constitutionalism—rooted in a commitment to social inclusion, human rights, the rule of law, and democracy—interacts with the legal architecture of the global economy. International trade and investment regimes, intellectual property rules, monetary and financial frameworks, and transnational corporate governance can both constrain and enable the achievement of transformative constitutionalism’s goals. Crucially, extractivism and its legacies loom large in this dialogue. Resource-dependent economies in Latin America highlight the entanglement of global capitalism, environmental degradation, and Indigenous dispossession. Moreover, the current run towards protectionism and the weaponization of economic tools to achieve geopolitical goals pose increasing challenges to the rule of law and the realization of human rights – particularly in Latin America. In that context, our aim is to translate that diagnosis into a focused conversation on doctrinal tools, institutional pathways, and explore potential shared vocabularies that align economic governance with transformative constitutionalism, and the limits of that alignment. We invite a dialogue that surfaces underlying assumptions, proposes common terminology, and identifies institutional practices—within national courts, administrative bodies, and the Inter-American system—through which constitutional commitments can inform economic governance in these challenging times, and vice versa.

Among many others, we invite interventions along the following guiding questions:

Transforming extractive legacies: What role can (and should) transformative constitutionalism play in re-imagining global structures of global extractivism (including digital extractivism), challenging dependency, and advancing alternative models of development?

Diagnosis: Through what doctrinal and conceptual channels and institutional sites do international economic law and related domestic economic instruments shape or impede transformative constitutionalism in Latin America (e.g., trade, investment, IP, IFIs, monetary and tax policy, supply chains, digital regulation)? Which patterns of tension and synergy are most salient?

Design & strategy: What interpretive techniques, constitutional review practices, institutional reforms, or regulatory redesigns can align economic governance with commitments to inclusion, equality, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights? How can the Latin America’s transformative mindset react to the increasing weaponization of economic tools targeting the region?

Epistemic bridges: How can courts, regulators, civil society, and scholars build shared vocabularies and metrics that allow transformative constitutionalism and international economic law, widely understood, to speak to one another productively in litigation, policymaking, and transnational standard-setting?