Helena Alviar

Helena Alviar García is a Colombian SJD from Harvard Law School and lawyer from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She served as Dean of Los Andes Law School where she also held tenure as full professor (profesora titular), teaching courses on Property, Public law, legal theory and feminist theory. She has been a visiting professor in universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States including Harvard Law School, University of Pennsylvania, Università di Torino, University of Miami, Universidad de Puerto Rico and University of Wisconsin in Madison. Notably, she was the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 2017; the Bok Distinguished Visiting Professor at Penn Law School in 2015 and the Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2008.

An expert in law and development, property law, social and economic rights, feminism and transitional justice, she has been invited to participate in global networks regarding these issues and has edited and co-edited volumes with academics from Europe and the United States. Author of books, book chapters, published academic papers and essays including: Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Critique and Appraisal, co-edited with Günter Frankenberg (2019); The Distributive Politics of Impunity and Anti-Impunity: Lesssons from Four Decades of Colombian Peace Negotiations (co-authored with Karen Engle), in Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (2016), Distribution of resources led by courts: a few words of caution in Social and Economic Rights in Theory and Practice (2014), Feminismo y crítica jurídica. El análisis distributivo como alternativa crítica al legalismo liberal coauthored with Isabel Jaramillo (2012), The Unending Quest for Land: The Tale of Broken Constitutional Promises in the Texas Law Review Symposium (2011); Legal Reform, Social Policy, and Gendered Redistribution in Colombia: The Role of the Family in the American University Journal of Gender Social Policy & the Law; Law, Development, and Feminism in Latin America in 2008.

Professor Alviar is also the co-founder of Dejusticia, one of the leading human rights NGO’s in the Global South. She is also an academic member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy-IGLP- at Harvard Law School.

Fields of Expertise : 

• Feminist theory and anti-discrimination

• Law and development

• Comparative property law

• Latin American Law and Institutions

• Social and economic rights

• Transitional justice