Fernando Bracaccini

Fernando Bracaccini is an Argentinean doctoral student (J.S.D.) at Yale Law School, where he earned his LL.M. degree in 2018 while he was a Fulbright Scholar. Fernando’s academic interests include the intersections of political theory and the philosophy of criminal law. His J.S.D. dissertation tackles the problem of the justification of state punishment in contexts where political and moral disagreements are pervasive by revisiting the question of the permissibility of punishment from the perspective of deliberative democracy. Multicultural contexts, as the Latin American, are characterized by the existence of strong disagreements between people regarding cultural norms, values, and conceptions of the good—this is recognized, for example, in the Bolivian Constitution which defines Bolivia as a pluri-national and multicultural state. Conventional theories of punishment fail on justifying punishment in these contexts because of their dependency on strong political and moral agreements within citizens—the sort of homogeneity they presuppose is often absent in actual societies. Fernando’s research explores the implications of this problem and aims at providing a justification of punishment relying in the theory of deliberative democracy, which focuses in democratic procedures rather than in values. The outcomes of this research may have practical implications for thinking the requirements of criminal liability—especially in contexts of strong cultural diversity, and for designing participatory and deliberative processes of criminal law reform.

Prior to his doctoral studies at Yale, Fernando earned his law degree at Universidad de Buenos and the degree of Specialist in Criminal Law at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He taught courses on Legal Theory, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Human Rights at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad de Palermo. He also worked in civil society organizations, in the Argentinean National Congress, in the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires, and clerked in criminal courts.