Juicios. Sobre La Elaboracin Del Genocidio II. By Daniel Feierstein. Buenos Aires: Fondo De Cultura Econmica, 2015. Shifting Legal Visions. Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America. By Ezequiel A. González‐Ocantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12322
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018

Juicios. Sobre La Elaboraci

on Del Genocidio II. By Daniel Feierstein.

Buenos Aires: Fondo De Cultura Econ

omica, 2015.

Shifting Legal Visions. Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin

America. By Ezequiel A. Gonz

alez-Ocantos. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas, Universitat Ram

on Llull

—Blanquerna, Barcelona

Daniel Feierstein is one of the few scholars who have studied sys-

tematic crimes of the state from a Latin American perspective.

Feierstein introduced genocide studies to sociology in the region.

In one of his first books he coined the term “genocidal social

practices” and outlined the process whereby the military dictator-

ship destroyed Argentinean social relations and established new

ones, based on a lack of solidarity, lack of recognition of the other,

and delation. Feierstein ended the first book of his series of three

books on genocide calling attention to the need to address guilt

understood in Karl Jasper’s sense, that is, criminal guilt, political

guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt (Feierstein 2007, 398). To

Feierstein, the fact that Argentina was holding new trials against

perpetrators (possible since the annulment of the impunity laws in

2005) showed that society was expecting impunity to end in order

to rebuild the community.

In his second book, Juicios. Sobre la Elaboraci

on del Genocidio II,

Feierstein addresses the trials against members of the Argentinean

dictatorship (1976–1983). In an interesting analysis, Feierstein dis-

cusses the use of the category of crimes against humanity by judges

in charge of investigating the crimes committed during the dictator-

ship. He observes that judges use the category of crimes against

humanity over that of genocide, and he deems this to be a mistake.

Feierstein, like others, criticizes the exclusion of political groups

from the definition of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention.

However, he goes deeper and finds that the reason for the rejection

of the category of political genocide and the reluctance judges have

to apply the crime of genocide, is the fact that the legal profession is

still trapped by positivism and its separation between morality and

legality and between substantial truth and procedural truth. Feier-

stein held in the first book of this trilogy that the representation of

the past determines the kind ofjustice people can have. And in Juic-

ios he adds that positivism, which he thinks is still dominant in legal

theory, has confiscated the faculty of judging and therefore has

made judges unable to go beyond the literal text of the law, and

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