Author: Rafael de Arízaga

Jurist

MacIntyre with the Jurists

Rafael de Arízaga

Friday, November 12 was the second day of the annual fall conference of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, dedicated this year to the topic of “Human Dignity in a Secular World.” As is customary, Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most remarkable living philosophers, graced the event with what in European universities was traditionally called a lección magistral, a magisterial—that is, a Master’s—lecture. MacIntyre’s truly excellent lecture is available online, and highly recommended.

Over at The Postliberal Order, Patrick Deneen offers a crisp, suggestive summary of this “bombshell” lecture, in which MacIntyre, with delicious elegance and learned restraint, appeared to undermine the premise of the conference almost entirely. As Deneen recounts, MacIntyre began by reminding his audience that the modern concept of dignity was purposely developed in the wake of the Second World War as a kind of placeholder-notion, vacuous by design, “that people of various faiths, secularists, different traditions, and varying nationalities could agree upon as a basis for a decent political and social order.” One is reminded of Jacques Maritain shamelessly pointing out in 1947, regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that given the disagreement among the drafters and proponents of the declaration on the source of the rights, it was enough merely to enumerate them without committing to any view about what made them intelligible. Hence, dignity talk. It served as a stand-in for a minimum standard of treatment of persons, but without contributing very much to an understanding of what that minimum standard actually requires in practice. The only claim is that whatever it is, dignity is “inherent” to the human person as such.

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Notes on the Ius Commune – Part I: The Hydra of Legal Positivism

Rafael de Arízaga

Marx and Engels famously wrote in The German Ideology that «hundreds of earlier writers» (earlier, that is, than Max Stirner) agreed that «right originated from force» — i.e., from violence.

Anyone surveying the last 350 years of the history of jurisprudence may be excused for agreeing with them. It has been a history of monstrous heavings and shakings, where the law has been taken up and wielded as a tool for all kinds of delirious and utopian schemes. The common thread has been the demolition of the political-juridical principles of the prior order, which have been torn down, gutted, and redefined one by one. The justification for this razing of our juridical bastions has generally been connected to a claim that those old structures were offensive to the «rights of man». A claim about rights — a claim of justice — is thus at the heart of Modernity. But it is a claim of a perverted, defaced justice. «If the essence of “modern” culture is voluntarism (which is the intimate secret of rationalism)», wrote Cornelio Fabro, «one should not be astonished if the truth is then identified with action and right with force … The crisis of the world is a crisis of rights, in that it is first and foremost a crisis of their foundation, that is, of principles».1

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Magín Ferrer and the Fundamental Law of the Spanish Monarchy

Rafael de Arízaga

Ernest Renan (author of a blasphemous Life of Jesus) once quipped that “hereditary monarchy is a political conception so profound that it is not within the reach of every intelligence to comprehend it.” Indeed, the doctrine of Christian monarchy was the crown jewel of classical public law. In order to introduce our readers to it, Ius & Iustitium presents here a translation of an excerpt from Fr. Magín Ferrer, O. de M.’s Fundamental Laws of the Spanish Monarchy (1843). It is a lucid and brief exposition of this theory from the pen of one of its great exponents.

Introduction

Magín Ferrer (1792-1853), a friar of the Royal and Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy, was one of the early writers—both doctor and pamphleteer—of the Carlist cause, the longest-living Catholic counter-revolutionary and integralist movement of the past two centuries.1 Carlism traces its origins to the break in 1833 of the Spanish royal house, when the death of Ferdinand VII pitted two lines, the agnate and the feminine, against each other.  The former was centered on the late King’s brother, the infante Don Carlos María Isidro (King Charles V), whose rights were founded on the old laws of the realm, and the latter on the infanta Isabel (called Isabel II), the King’s daughter, and on her mother, María Cristina of the Two Sicilies.  The followers of Don Carlos, Carlists, were the collection of anti-liberal, traditional forces of Spain, enemies of both the liberalism of the Cortes of Cádiz of 1812 and of the French-style absolutism of some reactionaries.  They traced their intellectual and moral roots back to the principles of the ancient Catholic Monarchy.  The followers of Isabel, the Isabelinos (or Cristinos, for her cunning mother), were their opponents: the forces of Spanish liberalism and their “conservative” enablers.

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Jurisprudence as a Subaltern Science

Rafael de Arízaga2 Comments
Ulpian

Part of revitalizing the classical legal tradition, as Ius & Iustitium proposes to do, is recovering the classical conception of the science of law, traditionally named Jurisprudence, which was defined by the Roman jurist Ulpian as “divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, iusti atque iniusti scientia” (“the awareness of divine and human affairs, the science of what is just and what is unjust”) (Digest I, I, 10, § 2). The part of the classical view that we want to focus on here is the idea that Jurisprudence is a subaltern science, that is, a science epistemologically ordered to other, higher sciences.

This subalternation explains how, on the classical conception, the law is structurally arrayed at the service of metaphysically and theologically rich conceptions of the common good. We may dispense with the vulgar notion that political or judicial mandarins must “put” an otherwise neutral tool called “law” at the service of some external end of their choosing, which may or may not happen to coincide with our own preferences. The truth is that the law, properly understood, is formally ordered to an objective end, the common good, by virtue of its own rational nature. Thus, in order to be epistemologically consistent, classical Jurisprudence understands itself to be intrinsically ordered to the higher sciences that study that objective end.

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Lecturas introductorias de Derecho Natural, Derecho Romano, Derecho Canónico e Historia del Derecho

Rafael de Arízaga

En Ius & Iustitium hemos preparado una lista de lecturas introductorias sobre Derecho Natural, Derecho Romano, Derecho Canónico e Historia del Derecho. En muchas facultades de Derecho —en el mundo hispánico y fuera de él— se ha ido desatendiendo poco a poco el estudio de estas materias, relegándolas a veces a asignaturas optativas o resumidas. En los Estados Unidos, lo más probable es que un alumno termine su formación jurídica sin haberse encontrado nunca con estas materias. Como dijera Álvaro d’Ors, las facultades de Derecho han pasado de formar “letrados” a graduar meros “gestores,” pues son estas materias fundamentales, enseñadas tradicionalmente en el primer curso de la carrera, la raíz de la formación de los letrados, de los juristas. La reputación que tienen de ser disciplinas arcanas y de poca utilidad solo se entiende desde la perspectiva del energético y superficial gestor.

Nos hemos enfocado aquí en obras secundarias de carácter propedéutico que puedan servir de entrada para el jurista (o estudiante de Derecho) que no ha estudiado estas materias a profundidad. No incluimos aquí una lista de fuentes primarias, que abordaremos en una entrada posterior. Aunque la lista está destinada a juristas, estas obras también pueden ser leídas con provecho por personas legas interesadas en la Jurisprudencia clásica.

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John Roberts, Conservative

Rafael de Arízaga1 Comment

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.

The Chief Justice’s decision to concur in the judgment in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo illustrates the usual political phenomenology of conservatism as the alleged antithesis to the principles of the liberal revolutions. Jaime Balmes, one of the great Catholic political philosophers and theologians of the 19th century, described the movement of all conservative political action in an 1844 article about the rise of moderate and conservative parties in Spain:

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