Julio Philippi Izquierdo (Santiago, Chile, 26 December 1912 – 30 March 1997) was a Chilean lawyer, diplomat, writer, researcher, academic and politician of German descent, associated with conservatism. He served as a minister of State in four different portfolios during the government of President Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964), and later as a member of the Constitutional Court by appointment of General Augusto Pinochet in 1981.
Family He was the son of former minister of finance Julio Philippi Bihl and Sara Izquierdo Phillips. He married Luz Irarrázaval Larraín, with whom he had eight children. Through his sister Adriana Paulina, he was brother-in-law of the conservative historian and lawyer Jaime Eyzaguirre. Among his children was Bruno Philippi, a Chilean businessman, academic and president of the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA).
Education A direct descendant of the German naturalist lineage that settled in Chile (Rodolfo Amando Philippi was his great-grandfather, and the biologist Vicente Izquierdo his grandfather), he studied at the German School of Santiago and later read law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, graduating in 1935. He later became a professor at that institution, teaching social economics (1933–1936), civil law (1939–1952), and philosophy of law (1953–1958). Formed intellectually during the turbulent 1930s, he maintained a strong independence from student politics, unlike many of his contemporaries who joined emerging political parties. During those years, he participated in the National Association of Catholic Students and the Social League, both of which were in tension with the Catholic hierarchy, which favored lay obedience to its interpretation of the times. His first exposure to Catholic social teaching came through conversations with Jesuit priest Fernando Vives Solar, a leading figure of the early 20th-century social-Christian movement in Chile.
Public life
Minister of State In 1958, Jorge Alessandri appointed him—valuing his political independence—as Minister of Justice and Minister of Lands and Colonization in his first cabinet. At the time, Philippi Izquierdo was serving as a lawyer before the Supreme Court of Chile. The 1960 earthquakes placed him in charge of the Ministry of Economy and Commerce, which was renamed the Ministry of Economy, Development and Reconstruction to oversee rebuilding efforts across ten affected provinces. He later returned to the Ministry of Lands and Colonization. In 1963, he again assumed the Ministry of Economy and three months later was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, a post he held until the end of the Alessandri administration.
Adviser and Constitutional Court member After leaving the Foreign Ministry, he continued advising the government of President Eduardo Frei Montalva at the request of Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdés, both in the Palena border dispute with Argentina and in the subsequent arbitration over the Beagle Channel dispute. He chaired the advisory commission for the Chilean defense throughout the governments of Frei Montalva, Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, culminating in the 1977 Arbitral Award. In 1981, he was appointed by the military government of General Augusto Pinochet as a member of the Constitutional Court of Chile. He voted against the ruling declaring Clodomiro Almeyda "contrary to the institutional order of the Republic" (Decision No. 46 of 1987). He was an active member of the Scientific Society of Chile and the Chilean Academy of Social, Political and Moral Sciences, and maintained a strong interest in botany and ornithology. He died in 1997 from pulmonary edema, surrounded by his family.
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