Learning experiences of oral litigation and mediation techniques in criminal matters: the case of the UNACH Law School

Abstract

The reform of 2008 in the matter of Mexican penal system produced that the educational ones of this subject had to look for other methods so that the students acquired the new abilities and required knowledge to operate like defenders and public prosecutors in the systems of penal justice and to understand the functions of judges, experts, victims and accused. The previous thing had that this constitutional reform meant the institutionalization of an oral penal process with principles like the immediacy, publicity, contradiction, concentration and continuity; in addition, the possibility was created like right to all justiciable of acceding to restaurativa justice in those crimes that are allowed. Both forms of conflict resolution, nevertheless, represented a challenge for the schools and faculties of right, because in them pedagogía of traditional education predominated one where it mainly valued the verbalización, the memorization and the attendance to classes, practices that single fortify the qualities of a system based on the formality, the writing and the unrestricted application of the text of the law, which makes difficult to the generation useful knowledge, abilities and skills so that the students develop as opposed to the new penal system successfully.

For that reason, in this document is the experience of learning developed in the Faculty of Right of the UNACH, where moot was implemented court that included not only the area of of the oral litigation in penal matter, but also restaurativa justice through the education of the techniques of mediation in this matter. This meant to make extracurricular activities, since the curriculum did not contemplate strategies to foment abilities and skills like the expression and oral argumentation, the use of the method of cases and, mainly, the use of the law in tactical missions by means of the interpretation, the analogy and the integration of facts, norms and judgments to solve legal problems. In that order of ideas, the internal aid in oral litigation and the corresponding one on mediation techniques, both in penal matter, meant true parteaguas not only for the Faculty of Right and the UNACH, but also for other institutions of superior education that found in this methodology the form to cause that their students understood the legal practice by means of the internal aids.