¿Deben los consultorios jurídicos colombianos transformarse o fusionarse con las clínicas jurídicas?

Abstract

In recent years, the need to carry out a legal reform on legal services offices has been raised in Colombia. Among the range of possibilities proposed, perhaps the most feasible is to transform legal services offices or merge them with legal clinics. Even the Colombian Association of Law Faculties (ACOFADE) has been promoting the transformation of law internships, proposing the possibility of eliminating legal services offices, which shows that the reform is imminent. It is thus necessary to analyze and challenge the feasibility of the above mentioned changes, by critically reconstructing the history of both models in order to avoid making the mistakes they have made in the past. The research study was carried out by analyzing specialized literature and drawing on the author’s professional experience as a coordinator of the Public Law division of the legal services office of Pontificia Bolivariana university. The paper concludes by defending the existence of the two models independently, advocating for a vindication of legal services offices, through a self-critical exercise that allows them to recognize their historical failures, granting them a new emancipatory and liberating character of the constraints imposed by the State, faculties of law and the law itself.