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The theory and philosophy of law are reflections on justice, and their maximum aspiration -or its- is to show why the law should be obeyed, that is, what is a legal duty and how it shows up. But theorizing about law today runs the risk of getting lost between the theory of democracy as the culmination of all justice, or some exposition or theory about human rights. The author purports to allude to the ontological moments (the things) and to the inescapable metaphysical data that underlie both duty and human personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of personal dignity was widely developed in the late Middle Ages. The labour of the authors of the Modern Age consisted in making this legacy more operative. Dignity came with the notion of person who is a being of a rational nature characterized by its incommunicability and dignity. The nominalists (Duns, Ockham, Gerson, Conrado or Biel) made, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a rather abusive use of the person in law and in comparison with them, Aquino appears to be less 'personalistic'. It turns out that Thomas Aquinas had a superior jurisprudential training to those of these other authors and did not consider it appropriate to solve a problem by claiming the qualitas personalis when that subject could be decided with the instruments of the law. In addition (and this would be a valuable clarification) he does not regard the person -with his consciousness and awareness- as an isolated being, but rather describes both realities as Cum alio scientia: man is formed in his own being and there is cum Aliis. In any case, the notion of the human being with the equal dignity inherent to every rational being is already fully present in Aquino. But it is present in the way that we could call 'jurisprudential', in the way of the most classic jurists. Surely D. Alvaro d'Ors would agree very much with this way of presenting personality in law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seventeenth century we have lost sight of justice, which has been confined within the “theories of justice". Throughout Modernity, these theories were prsented under the guise of Natural Law Systems and, they continue to be so, today, as theories on justice. The autor indicates that these theories have historically disguised the form of synthesizing, a priori, nuclear definitions in which the initially proposed axioms were sufficient for posterior development. In this paper the author presents a review of that situation, with special attention to its historical genesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual movements, from the seventeenth century till today, have followed the changes in scientific methods. Indeed, Newtonian Mechanics dominated as a paradigm of all knowledge until the first third of the twentieth century had passed. Max Planck dismantled Newton's bases and Kurt Godel, through his demonstration of the limiting axioms, tore to shreds the hopes of those who had wanted to prolong the use of the traditional methods through mathematics. Both legal positivism and logical empiricism had been based on the confusing framework set by the old mechanics in the field of Humanities based on the elaboration of logical constructs which attempted to set forth a theory on humanity and its improvement. Once the simple, ethical relativisms have come to an end, it is time to return to a certain degree of ontology in law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]