Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Given the lack of regulation about the protection of collective rights in Peru, the main goal of this investigation is to show what should be some elements of the content of a due collective process. Thus each of its elements is studied taking into account the Peruvian jurisprudence and legislation.

The text aims to identify aspects that should be considered in preparing the State’s institutions to effectively combat human trafficking of a transnational nature. It addresses four main issues. First, it notices the specific problems of foreign human trafficking victims, which could be confused or overlapped with other categories, such as migrant smuggling and illegal migrant status. Subsequently, it develops three fundamental arguments that give primacy to their status as victims of human trafficking and their specialized attention from a human rights perspective. Thirdly, it provides guidelines on the elements that should constitute this approach from the specific rights of foreign victims of human trafficking. Finally, the Peruvian legal and institutional framework is analyzed, as well as its possibilities and challenges for adequate attention to foreign victims of trafficking.

The traditional model of initial training of judges in Spain and in other countries has been focused, and is still focused, on the mechanical digestion of a pile of stereotyped notions related to several legal subjects.This knowledge is presented with no references to specific legal disputes and does not meet at all, neither the profile of modern complex constitutional legal systems consisting of several levels, internally changing and conflicting; nor the practice of those systems. It does correspond, however, the historical model of the Napoleonic judge, who tends to act as a mechanical enforcer of the law and the longa manu of the real power rather than guardian of the citizens’ basic rights. The alternative to this kind of judicial training would be a system of training incorporating a high quality operative knowledge of the positive law actually in force, together with a theoretical-philosophical training in line with the suggestions made by Manuel Sacristán of «a level of exercise of thinking» based on the specific field and activity inherent to that group of legal practitioners.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the causes and antecedents that have contributed to the fact that, in Argentina, the office of Ombudsman remains vacant. Likewise, the normative origins of the organ are reviewed, in order to understand its value and democratic mission. In the ruling entitled Center for Studies for the Promotion of Equality and Solidarity and Others and the Ministry of Energy and Mining under Collective Protection (Centro de Estudios para la Promoción de la Igualdad y la Solidaridad y otros c/ Ministerio de Energía y Minería s/ amparo colectivo), issued on August 18, 2016, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation exhorted the Congress of the Nation to appoint an Ombudsman in accordance with the provisions conferred on it by article 86 of the National Constitution. The Court’s decision exposed a long-standing legal problem: the absence of an Ombudsman.

The Constitution of Peru claims a law, which regulates the coordination of the indigenous justice with the national judicial system. But since 1993 when the Constitution was enacted, Congress has failed to fulfill this task. The article describes the problems resulting from this legal vacuum and substantiates the need for a law of intercultural coordination of the judiciaries. However, the content of the required law is controversial. In the discussion four currents of opinion can be determined. The end points are characterized, on the one hand, by the «minimalists», who want to reduce the legal competences of the communities to a minimum, and the «maximalists», on the other hand, who advocate unlimited competences of the indigenous judiciary. The article analyzes the arguments of the different currents of opinion and identifies the challenges of the legislative work.

This essay examines and juxtaposes Mario Jori’s and Frederick Schauer’s ideas on legal formalism. Although developed independently of each other, these ideas show remarkable similarities: both focus on the notion of norm or rule as a tool for clarifying the notion of legal formalism; both defend legal formalism from the criticisms routinely moved against it. The author maintains that Jori’s and Schauer’s theories may contribute to shed light on (and criticize) the controversial notion of defeasibility of legal rules; they may also contribute to scale down, from a legal-theoretical point of view, the novelties of contemporary constitutional orders; finally, it may help to better understand their working machinery.

This paper shows a mismatch between a real and pressing demand for a philosophical analysis that allows us to explain the emergence of new phenomena in law, and the limited supply of theoretical tools to satisfy this demand by the traditional model of positivistic science of law. After an initial diagnosis of a mismatch between supply and demand, the resistance of legal positivism to accept practical rationality stands out as a core problem of the traditional model of positivistic science of law and the viability of this way of rationality is defended. The paper concludes with a proposal for the reinvention of the philosophy of law of the 21st century that incorporates new objectives and rethinks its method.

The author challenges the terminology «legal presumptions» and «judicial presumptions», and rather refers to presumptions established by rules of presumption and to hominis presumptions. He argues that the best way to differentiate between them is by showing the contrast between «it shall be presumed» (syntagm proper to practical reasoning) and «it is presumable» (syntagm proper to theoretical reasoning). The text clarifies the relationship between the so-called hominis presumptions and the factual inferences or evidential inferences, in general. He answers the question of what the «it is presumed» syntagm (proper to the hominis presumptions) brings with respect to the «it is probable» syntagm (proper of all evidentiary inferences).

This paper aims to explore the functions of the theory of legal argumentation (TLA) on Constitutional States and will especially focus on the political and self-reflective functions of the TLA within the framework of a neo-constitutionalistic legal theory. The first part of the paper includes a definition of the TAL and an analysis of its main functions. At the end of the paper the author provides the bases for the development of a neoconstitutionalistic legal theory.

Law in a transnational context loses the features with which it has been configured since modernity. Classic distinctions between national and international, public and private, substantive and procedural, legal and political, social and legal lose their rigidity in a context of norms, orders, institutions and agents that interact and overlap in diverse and changing ways. A legal theory capable of explaining and evaluating this overflowing legal reality is lacking. A theoretical reflection on international law is not enough. Transnationalism appeals to a plurality of legal actors and spaces that interact to create, interpret and enforce rules which they mutually identify with. Transnationalism does not only refer to the global or the supranational, but to the interdependence of both with the local and transit spaces. And this translates into a change of focus or perspective that is required of each legal agent: management of the interrelation between diverse orders aimed to create spaces for approach, contestation and innovation is a normative requirement and it must be weighed against other legal values. Concepts to which legal theory must focus its attention change their meaning. The work refers to four of those concepts that I consider essential: social group or community, relations between orders and interlegality, coercion and normative diversity. The last part of the paper addresses the way in which these necessary changes have a place in our theories elaborated from the perspective of the great traditions of legal philosophy. What legal positivism, socio-legal theory and legal realism have in common might be an appropriate approach to the review of our discipline.