orejarena.org — Caribbean coast, Colombia

Alexander
Orejarena-Correa

Jurist. Researcher. Essayist.

I study how law knows what it claims to know. Everything published here proceeds from a single premise: that legal knowledge must answer to the same conditions of rigor it demands of everyone else.


Trajectory

One question, held long enough.

Formation in law and conflict resolution at the Universidad del Magdalena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The undergraduate thesis, defended in 2023, brought Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis and Kahneman's cognitive psychology into the epistemology of law, and it remains the theoretical axis of everything written since. Its claim is simple to state and difficult to escape: whoever says the law knows something has described an observer, and observers are biological systems before they are institutions.

Two lines of research remain open. The first examines the epistemic architecture of Colombian constitutional doctrine — what the Constitutional Court counts as knowledge, by what operations it produces certainty, and who is permitted to stand as its knower. The second follows human dignity out of its Kantian abstraction toward capacities with identifiable neurobiological substrates: deliberative autonomy, consciousness, empathy. Neither line concludes; both are the same question asked of different objects.


Research

The documentary record.

Undergraduate thesis — Universidad del Magdalena, 2023

Análisis de los aportes interdisciplinares a la comprensión de lo jurídico como epistemología científica

An integration of biology, neuroscience, Greek philosophy and legal anthropology into a single framework for reading law as scientific epistemology. Maturana's conditions of scientificity supply the methodological structure; the argument holds legal knowledge to the standard of any empirical discipline that claims to know.

Read on Academia.edu ↗

Article — applied legal epistemology

¿Es la dignidad humana un concepto obsoleto en la jurisprudencia de la Corte Constitucional?

A challenge to the Kantian foundation of human dignity as the Colombian Constitutional Court applies it. The article proposes grounding dignity in concrete capacities with identifiable neurobiological substrates — deliberative autonomy, consciousness, empathy — rather than in metaphysical principle.


Essays


Correspondence

If the question is serious.

Research collaborations, editorial inquiries, and disagreements argued in good faith are equally welcome. Write, and say what the question is.