Es para mí un honor colaborar en este número de los Anales de la Cátedra Francisco Suárez, que publica el Departamento de Filosofía del Derecho de nuestra Facultad de la Universidad de Granada. Lo es por la prestigiosa Alma Mater que respalda la revista como por mis amigos y colegas Nicolás López Calera y Modesto Saavedra, por su editor Pedro Mercado y todos los demás amigos y colegas granadinos. Mi primera publicación, creo que en los años sesenta fue también un (...) pequeño trabajo sobre las razones de mi vocación filosófico jurídica en los Anales, lo cual expresa mi afecto y mi fidelidad. (shrink)

Starting from the impossibility of understanding fundamental rights from the standpoint of natural law doctrine or positivism, the author tackles the issue of rights from a realistic point of view, that is to say from the perspective of law and politics on the one hand, and from the perspective of public morality, on the other. Thus the foundation of fundamental rights is the meeting point of conceptions of social morality that are current in the modern world and the political aspect (...) of the conception of pluralist democracy. Moreover, fundamental rights are considered an instrument to enable the social and moral development of human beings. (shrink)

. The author analyses the concept of legal security from its historical evolution to its main structural aspects. In the first part he argues that legal security is a historical and cultural concept of the modern world. He considers a series of factors which lead from the general concept of security generated by an ideological monism and the social rigidity characterizing the Middle Ages to the concept of legal security protected by the legal monism of the modern state, where legal (...) security, understood as formal or procedural justice, has become a principle inspiring the entire legal system. Then he considers legal security in the social state as the expression of the relationship between man and his social needs. In the second part the author makes a structural analysis of the concept of legal security in a modern legal order, identifying the different spheres in which it can be found: state,—focusing on procedural guarantees as limits to power—, law—considering the internal functioning of the legal system—, society—stressing the effects of the action of the social state on the idea of legal security. (shrink)