núm. 28 (2008)

La Universidad Santo Tomás acaba de publicar el libro Introducción al Derecho Administrativo ale- mán. Esta obra recoge las conferencias que sobre esta temática dictó el profesor Hartmut Maurer, en el seno de la Maestría en Derecho Público que dicha Universidad ofrece en convenio académico con la Universidad de Konstanz, Alemania.

Colombia’s National Constitutional Assembly did not approve the legal figure of unconstitutionality by omission. This figure, which is fundamental for the defence of the principles on which the political constitution is based, seeks to guarantee that the will of the Constitutional Assembly is carried out in full and that erosion does not occur. The materialisation of the Constitution has its negation in the inertial devaluation of the Magna Carta. What may occur is a violation of the constitutional principles by omission in the development of the international human rights treaties, which, although properly signed and ratified by a State, could compromise the constitutional block as a whole.

Contemporary law establishes important guarantees for citizens in order to prevent arbitrary behaviour by public authorities. The present article analyses the tension between torture and law with a real case from Germany, in which a kidnapper made a declaration with the threat of violence by police officers. This case produced an intensive debate on the civil rights and liberties as well as the methods applied by the police in the obtaining of information.

This rehearsal looks for to leave certain the origin of the CIDH, its contribution in the guarantee of the human rights, the procedure to consent to her, and the achievements reached with some of its shortcomings in our state, regarding the search of the judicial truth, justice and integral repair to the victims; the right of everything kills of consenting to the effective judicial resource.

In Germany, the Constitution grants important mechanisms and institutions to protect the liberty of its citizens in all its different manifestations. However, the recent dynamics of securities within the framework of the war against terrorism has led to new politics which tend to affect and weaken the right to liberty. The objective of the present article is to analyze liberty in the light of the war against terrorism and the new security patterns which arise in Germany.

The understanding of the relations of the triad person - society - law finds an appropriate interpretation in Bobbio’s General Theory of Law. His Theory of Legal Order is conclusive with regard to the explanations of the behaviour of the plurality of legal norms (explanations that derive from the Theory of the Legal Norm). It clarifies the systematic functioning of the production of law, in which a variety of its operators intervene in an organized way. The explanation of the law as a system allows the clarification, in a methodological and pedagogical way, of the relation between the powers and the duties of a social constitutional state.

In the thinking of some of the most significant legal philosophers of the last decades, such as R. Dworkin and A. Kaufmann, one can find the permanent insistence on the need for taking the personal rights seriously, as well as establishing a law which is not only implemented but also takes into account the economic and social necessities of the people. Nowadays, this need is even more pertinent, given the fact that we live in a society of worldwide risks, in which mankind has to face - among other things due scientific research on the human being - a number of serious challenges. One of them is that we must acknowledge those anthropological criterions which constitute non-negotiable, absolute truths.These criterions must be the basis of the law as well as its reason to be. This claim leads us to state – from the perspective of the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical realism, which influences with more and more impetus the current thinking – the necessity of founding the law based on the human being itself, while respecting the radicality of its existence. This concept implicates that the human being must be understood metaphysically. Also, it points out the reality of the human de suyo – to use a term by the Spanish philosopher X. Zubiri –, a reality which represents a limit that may not be exceeded by science so as not to put in danger the very existence of mankind.

This article proposes an introductory overview of the development of the Sociology of Law: its historical origins, sources, debates and main authors are briefly sketched throughout this dissertation. This insight provides important guidelines to approach this relatively new discipline in our country from two forgotten authors, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Georges Gurvitch. Their heterodox and contesting viewpoints as well as their pluralist thought, radical ideas on democracy, justice and equality are meaningful elements for analyzing the current state of affairs of Colombian society. Furthermore, this insight provides the framework for understanding the development of the Sociology of Law as a source of social transformation.

This work try to put question the calls “justices” in the social scene where they are applied, with the goal of to establish if the questions form legal field different that state legal field. The article, also wants to explain the scopes of this practices of justice in the current discourse of the law, look that is done, of course, from the critical trends.