small, dim nodes open · large, bright nodes are shared themes
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.
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.
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 ↗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.
Read on Academia.edu ↗Every right is a matter of politics.
Reading Colombia's 2025 crisis — an emergency decree suspended by the Court, a pension reform struck down on procedural grounds — through Critical Legal Studies (Duncan Kennedy, Jeremy Waldron, Roberto Unger, Roberto Gargarella, Mark Tushnet), the essay traces how the Constitutional Court's doctrine of "substitution" and its states of unconstitutional affairs function as undeclared constituent power, and asks whether judicial review protects rights or simply replaces popular deliberation with the interpretation of an unelected legal elite.
These are selected pieces. The rest of the writing lives on Substack.
On the impossibility of separating the author from the work.
Starting from Maturana and Varela's biology of cognition — "everything said is said by someone" — the essay argues that the demand to separate author from work is an epistemological fiction, and reads cases from Heidegger's Nazi rectorship to Alice Munro's silence about her husband's abuse to show that an author's blind spots are inscribed in the work itself, as the shape of what could not be said.
These are selected pieces. The rest of the writing lives on Substack.
The history of law we were taught is the guild's autobiography, not the history of law.
Drawing on Thomas Duve's category of normative knowledge, the essay follows ordering practices that never needed the state's permission — from Wayuu palabreros to Salamanca's theologians to Colombia's armed and informal economies — and reads the 1991 Constitution's recognition of indigenous jurisdiction not as a concession but as a confession: the monopoly never existed.
These are selected pieces. The rest of the writing lives on Substack.
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.