Sistema Regional de Información
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In this text I will propose a defense of legal skepticism against Hart’s criticisms. To do this, I will show that a skeptical position allows us to overcome Dworkin’s challenge, while this does not happen with Hartian conventionalism. According to Hart, skepticism is a bad theory of legal duties, since it does not fit with judges’ statements of duty. However, Dworkin has argued that Hart’s theory is also unsuccessful on that regard. Some author sought in the notion of convention a response to Dworkin: I will refer here to Marmor’s constitutive conventionalism and Postema’s constructive conventionalism. From my point of view, in the attempt to respond to Dworkin, both proposals end up exaggerating the cooperative dimension of legal practice. I will defend a different solution that consists of reformulating some skeptical theses. To do this, I will maintain, first of all, that judges’ statements of duty are a projection of their attitudes both on the action considered obligatory or prohibited and on the conventional interpretive method used to support that statement. Second, this projectivist perspective can explain the judges’ discourse in terms of truth value and their disagreements.

In this article, the author pursues the dual objective of critically analyzing Hans Kelsen’s thought, noting the existence of an apparent contradiction or tension, while also attempting to resolve this tension through reconstruction and reaffirming the enduring relevance of Kelsen’s legacy. To this end, the author begins by recalling the most fundamental aspects of Kelsen’s “pure”—and even “general”—theory of law. The analysis proceeds with a review of, on the one hand, Kelsen’s theory of limited democracy, approached through its juxtaposition not only with autocracy but also with unlimited democracy; and on the other hand, his theory of constitution and constitutional supremacy, with particular attention given to both the creation-application of law and its control through interpretation, in general, and constitutional interpretation, in particular. The article concludes with a final reflection.

This paper presents the main theses of what in recent years I have analyzed under the concept of punitive populism, seen as a complex phenomenon that conflates penal policy with politics, criminology and even moralism in social media. Thus, in order to present my critical outlines, I offer in the second section a definition of punitive populism, while in the third section I explore its relationship with media criminology, in order to, in the fourth section, develop my ideas on punitive populism and moralism in social networks. In the fifth section I expose the legislative and penal consequences of punitive populism and, finally, in the sixth section, I present a normative proposal to reduce the effects of punitive populism.

The doctrine of the minimum content of natural law, elaborated by Herbert Hart, has been one of the least discussed aspects of this author’s work in continental tradition. Normally, when jurists refer to it, it is for the sole purpose of outlining its content, but little do they pay attention to the consequences that it may have for Hartian positivism as well as to analyze other theses by this author. In this line, this work aims to present some critical observations on the doctrine of the minimum content of natural law, and how it is presented in some respects as inconsistent with other aspects of Hart’s work.

This article discusses the relationship between democratic theory and the institutions that aim to realize it. Given the connection between the two, any explanation of democratic institutions inherently reflects, even unintentionally, a theory of democracy, and vice versa. This point is illustrated through a “realist” understanding of democracy, using Hans Kelsen’s Essence and value of democracy as an example. The “populist” critique of actually existing democracy unexpectedly aligns with a realist theory like Kelsen’s. The question then arises as to whether this alignment reveals something about the impossibility of democracy in our time, which would therefore be characterized as the era of populism.

The moral, legal, and political assessment and categorization of the provision of a social minimum is controversial because it borders on being an essentially contested concept from at least four distinct perspectives through which political economic activity is evaluated: the market viewpoint (commutative perspective), the labor and production viewpoint (contributive perspective), the public institution viewpoint (distributive perspective), and the unproductive expenditure or complementary consumption viewpoint (donative perspective). This paper will focus on the viewpoint of public institutions responsible for determining what constitutes a socially just distribution of a social minimum. To accomplish this, it will outline a conceptual framework in which the distribution of a social minimum can be meaningfully debated in conceptually transparent terms. The hypothesis behind building this platform is that understanding the social minimum as a distribuendum should be based on an understanding of distributable goods as a valuable kind of resource, whether material or immaterial. Accordingly, the paper will outline the conceptual variations of a resource-oriented understanding of the social minimum as a requirement of distributive justice.