Background: The risk of surgery in eloquent areas is related to neuropsychological dysfunctions. Maximizing the extent of resection increases the overall survival. The onco-functional balance is mandatory when surgery involves cognitive areas, and maximal information on the cognitive status of patients during awake surgery is needed. This can be achieved using direct cortical stimulation mapping and, in addition to this, a neuropsychological monitoring technique called real-time neuropsychological testing. The RTNT includes testing protocols based on the area where the surgery is (...) performed. We reported on tests used for left temporal lobe surgery and our RTNT decision tree.Case Report: We reported our RTNT experience with a 25-year-old right-handed man with 13 years of schooling. He reported daily partial seizures. MRI revealed the presence of a low-grade glioma involving the temporo-insular cortex. The neuropsychological status presurgery which was within the normal range was combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging information. Awake surgery plus RTNT was performed. Direct electrical stimulation during object naming elicited a motor speech arrest. Resection was continuously accompanied by the RTNT. The RTNT provided enriched information to the surgeon. Performance never dropped. A slight decrement in accuracy emerged for pseudoword repetition, short-term memory and working memory, phonological processing, and verbal comprehension. Total resection was performed, and the histological examination confirmed the nature of the lesion. Immediate postsurgery performance was within the normal range as it was the fMRI and DTI assessment.Conclusion: The RTNT provides essential information that can be used online, during surgery, for clinical aims to provide the surgeon with useful feedback on the cognitive status of patients. (shrink)

The paper examines Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the state and representation in light of the historical development of the idea of the people as a corporation and its use in late-medieval and early-modern theories of resistance. Consequently, it is argued that Hobbes’s use of a corporate metaphor for the state embodied a rejection of the ius gentium reading of the people as a corporate body that legitimised the right of resistance to the sovereign power. By incorporating the state, not the (...) people, and championing a single covenant of a dissociated multitude that leads to its generation, Hobbes undermined the basis on which advocates of popular sovereignty justified opposition to the sovereign; a prerogative derived in their eyes from a covenant between the people and the ruler. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia críticamente el concepto de Ius Constitutionale Commune Latinoamericanum como fenómeno de judicialización de la política a nivel regional. Partiendo de la afirmación de que el derecho constitucional es político, se analizan algunos rasgos del ICCAL como la ideología que lo inspira, la teoría en que se apoya el concepto y el arreglo institucional que lo sostiene, para problematizar su carácter "común". Bajo el entendido que cualquier proyecto constitucional está indisolublemente ligado a un diseño institucional que lo lleva (...) a cabo, se critica la apuesta por un modelo juricentrista, anclado en la interpretación que la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos hace de los derechos reconocidos como universales, para proponer un sistema basado en procedimientos deliberativos e igualitarios que fortalezcan la democratización de la región. This article critically examines the concept of Ius Constitutionale Commune Latinoamericanum as a phenomenon of judicialization of politics at the regional level. To problematize its "common" character and based on the assertion that constitutional law is political, some features of the ICCAL are analyzed: the ideology that inspires it, the theory in which the concept is supported and the institutional arrangement that sustains it. Under the understanding that every constitutional project is inextricably linked to an institutional design that carries it out, the commitment to a jury-centered model, anchored in the interpretation that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights makes of the rights recognized as universal is criticized. Proposing, in contrast, a system based on deliberative and egalitarian procedures that strengthen the democratization of the region. (shrink)

This paper seeks to challenge the long-standing interpretation of the ius vitae necisque as a formal legal right of Roman fathers. It offers a review and critique of the evidence upon which the claim of ancient origin is founded and highlights the consequent problems in comprehending late Republican and Imperial references to the killing of sons by fathers. An alternative and more satisfactory understanding is to be found in sociological thinking and it is argued that the comprehension of the ius (...) vitae necisque as a formal right is not only invalid but obscures the real significance of its promotion as a political phenomenon in the age of Augustus and the early emperors of Rome. (shrink)

This article intends to argue that Francisco de Vitoria’s conception of the Spanish Conquest of America is based upon notions that stem from various sources of the 14th and 15th Century. One of his most important source is the Opus septipertitum de contractibus, written by the German theologian Conradus Summenhart, whom Vitoria quotes frequently. By comparing both thinkers it can be shown that Vitoria’s basic terminology concerning rights and dominion is in greatly indebted to Summenhart’s account.

Según la noción clásica el derecho es el objeto de la justicia; también clásicamente se dice que el ius es lo justo, lo debido. Según esto, el ius naturale es lo justo que se funda en la naturaleza y es lo debido por naturaleza. Frente a estas nociones clásicas Thomas Hobbes define al ius naturale como la libertad que cada hombre tiene de usar su propio poder como quiera, para la conservación de su propia naturaleza, es decir, de su vida. (...) También podemos marcar la diferencia entre la concepción clásica de la ley natural como dictamen de la razón práctica que ordena al hombre hacia el fin inscripto en su naturaleza, permitiendo reconocer el bien y el mal afin de realizar el primero y evitar el último, de la noción moderna hobbesiana que concibe la lex naturalis como norma general que obliga a realizar lo que preserve mejor su vida u omitir lo que pueda destruirla o privarle de los medios de conservarla. El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar cómo y porqué se llega a estas diferencias tan marcadas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ius Gentium as Publicly Articulated Moral ScienceMatthew K. MinerdAmong the various types of law discussed in St. Thomas's theological "treatise on law"—questions 90–108 of Summa theologia [ST] I-II—the classification known as the "law of nations" (ius gentium) holds an ambiguous epistemological position. Marking a kind of halfway point between the natural law and civil law, it seems to straddle both domains. In fact, in a particularly important text dedicated (...) to this topic in the ST (I-II, q. 95, a. 4), Aquinas classes the ius gentium as being closely connected to the natural law, though in a way that is somewhat derivative, not as immediately flowing from human nature (especially in its animality) as does the natural law, but also not as marked by human contingency as is human civil law.As was recently discussed in a well-documented and insightful article by Barrett H. Turner in The Thomist, there have historically been two main lines of Thomist interpretation concerning the exact character of the "law of nations." Very broadly stated, what he refers to as the "Salamancan" line, indebted to Francisco de Vitoria, "interprets Thomas's doctrine of the ius gentium as a body of universal positive institutions (that is, specifications, determinationes) added to the natural law by agreement of the human race."1 [End Page 1043] This position, which would be common for several centuries among members of the Thomist school, would locate the law of nations essentially in the domain of nearly universally adopted customs and institutions, not strictly deduced from the natural law, but rather grounded on "the quasi-political authority of the entire human race, which promulgates the ius gentium by customs whose utility for attaining the ends of the natural law under a certain set of social conditions is easily recognized by rational creatures."2Turner calls the other line of thought "Maritain's Neo-Thomist Line,"3 an outlook that would be shared with various nuances by thinkers like Jean-Marie Aubert, Yves Simon, Marie-Michel Labourdette, John Finnis, and others. Setting aside my qualms about his appellation "neo-Thomist," which does more to obscure than to illumine (for it covers a host of Thomistic figures who have significantly different views on what constitutes "Thomism"), Turner does fairly lay out the major lines of Jacques Maritain's position, which is most directly articulated in Man and the State and La loi naturelle ou loi non-écrite.4 Basing himself on his particular view of knowledge of the natural law through connaturality,5 Maritain contrasted this sort of moral cognition with that which develops in the line of conceptual articulation, thus having a different "gnoseological" character from our knowledge of the natural law, while nonetheless still sharing the same "ontological" foundation. Such conceptually articulated law would be the ius gentium.Rather than add my voice to the dialectic of the various thinkers arrayed by Turner into the two aforementioned camps, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the "moral epistemology of the law of nations," though one that I believe lies in line with the best aspects of Maritain's approach. Continuing a series of reflections that I have undertaken [End Page 1044] concerning moral epistemology during the past few years,6 I propose that it is most helpful to consider the "law of nations" as being a form of reasoning pertaining to what Scholastic vocabulary would refer to as "moral science,"7 namely discursive philosophical reasoning concerning the essences, properties, effects, and various other essential relationships that belong to a human acts, morally considered (the principal subject of moral philosophy), along with other subjects that are studied in relation to this principal subject (e.g., the principles of human acts, most particularly, the structure of human acts and the moral virtues). Moral science is the activity of reasoning that can be undertaken by knowing agents living together in community, seeking to discursively articulate and explain the moral truth that forms the essential basis for the contingent determinations that will then be codified in particular civil laws, the latter of which are not concerned with questions like "what are the ultimate foundations for property... (shrink)

This is a reprint of chapters 4–5 of The Medieval Polish Doctrine of the Laws of Nations: Ius Gentium by Stanisław Wielgus (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1998), 55–101. The original chapter and section numbering has been retained, but footnote numbers have been adapted. Reprinted with the Author’s permission. In attempting to summarize in a few sentences the achievements of the medieval scholars of the Polish school of ius gentium, we must emphasize that by employing the inherited legal and (...) philosophico-theological tradition and intellectual achievements of the University of Kraków, coupling it with their own genius, they manager to create a coherent and universal system of international law. It was a system so modern, wise, tolerant and universal that it was able to be applied not only in solving the painful problem stemming from the lengthy conflict between Poland and the Teutonic Knights but was also used in resolving global problems of the contemporary Christian’s world conflict with the non-Christian one. That legal system, based upon the eternal principles of Divine and natural law, taking account of the Gospel Law of Love and inseparably connecting law with morality and justice with truth, remains valid even today. (shrink)

Taking hints from the Italian writer and comedian Paolo Villaggio’s works having the unlucky-to-the-utmost accountant Fantozzi as their hero, the essay tackles the issue of the role, and the possible foundations, of the law in the theoretical scenario of a perfectly deterministic world, where everything is determined by pre-set nexuses of cause-and-effect. Fantozzi is condemned by such an inescapable law of causation (Fate) to meet constant failure, in a social context structured along stiff hierarchies which are completely independent from individual (...) merits, where law enforcement always sides with the lucky ones. Within such a context, the law cannot be grounded on rational foundations-thinking, since the only possible rational conclusion is that the law is completely useless. At the same time, the law cannot be considered an outcome of power, since any power different from that of Fate is mere illusion. The essay wonders whether, in such a theoretical setting, there is the possibility of finding an alternative foundation for the law on non-objectifying thinking, starting from imagination and the idea of justice. Is it possible to imagine reliable rules based on imagination? (shrink)