In the 17th century natural and international law stood as the first theory of the modern state. But what did it look like before it was caught up in the history of modern statehood? In the topology of early modern knowledge ius naturae was regarded as a body of established thinking common to all disciplines. Philosophy, theology and jurisprudence were in complete agreement on a number of points: natural law was God-given; since the act of Creation divine commandments had been (...) inscribed into the hearts of men; natural law, the Decalogue, and the demands of ethics were identical. Natural law was nothing other than the eternal order imposed on humankind and the world by God since time began. Can this idea be reconciled with the modern state, its origins in disorder, and its need for the decision-making exercise of will? (shrink)

La justicia, según Domingo de Soto, co-fundador de la Escuela de Salamanca, es el eje que vincula ley y derecho, los dos núcleos de su De iustitia et iure. Y la justicia, cuyo tratamiento último lo proporciona la filosofía y la teología, es una virtud humana que busca la justa relación de dos elementos, y que tiene por objeto la equidad, que se mide no tanto por la intención del agente, sino por su contenido objetivo. Lo justo se mide por (...) dos planos, el del presupuesto y la consecuencia a los que se corresponden la ley y el derecho, con una estructura teleológica. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The question whether both enemies in a war could claim the same right, was a fundamental topic in the early modern theory of war and Grotius treated it briefly in his On Law of Prize and Booty. The jurisprudence of the seventeenth century developed two explanations: the Scholastic tradition held that only one party could fight with right reason, whereas some authors of the humanistic tradition thought that in some cases it was impossible to solve this question. Grotius took elements (...) from both traditions, applying them to two different levels of his argument. If we namely consider the rulers, we should accept the Scholastic conclusion that only one party can fight with right reason. But the subordinate soldiers do not always have an exhaustive knowledge of the situation and need first of all to acknowledge that their superiors command legitimately. Thus, each level uses a different logical relationship in the Aristotelian square because the enemies follow in the former case the pattern of contrary propositions, but in the latter they obey a pattern of subcontrary propositions. (shrink)