Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni

Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni, born in 1940 in Buenos Aires, is an Argentine jurist who earned his doctorate in law from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in 1964 and became professor and chair of criminal law at the University of Buenos Aires. He served two decades on Argentina's Federal Penal Court from 1975 to 1990, took part in Argentina's 1994 constitutional assembly, and was a justice of Argentina's Supreme Court from 2003 to 2015 before serving as a judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 2016 to 2022. A leading figure of the garantista, or criminal law minimalist, school, Zaffaroni developed what he calls an agnostic theory of punishment that rejects traditional justifications for imprisonment, and he has written twenty-five books, including the five-volume Tratado de Derecho Penal, along with the Manual de Derecho Penal. He won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2009.