Abstract

In the history of political and legal thought we can consider either the ideological contents or the way of communicating them. If we reconstruct the history of Late Scholasticism in this second sense, we can appraise the contribution of Domingo de Soto, who organized the entire scholastic matter in a clear system and introduced with his treatise On justice and law a successful literary form of discussion. In this sense, Soto deserves to be considered a founder of Late Scholasticism together with Francisco de Vitoria. Relevant is the scheme he adopted in the topological distribution, as he joined the notions of law and of justice through a doctrine of freedom and dominion, which figured as a true starting point for a theory of law, especially for a theory of natural law