Luis Jimenez de Asua

Luis Jiménez de Asúa (Madrid, June 19, 1889-Buenos Aires, November 16, 1970) was a Spanish jurist and politician who served as Vice President of the Congress of Deputies and representative of Spain before the League of Nations. During the Franco dictatorship he went into exile in Argentina. He was president of the Second Spanish Republic in exile.

Biography

Childhood and academic training

Born at number 84 Calle de Hortaleza in Madrid, he was christened Luis Gabriel Gervasio. He was the eldest son of Felipe Jiménez y García de la Plaza from Toledo, and Dolores de Asúa y de Bascarán from Bilbao. Years later, the couple would have a second son: Felipe Jiménez de Asúa.

He completed his baccalaureate at the Cardenal Cisneros General and Technical Institute, where he obtained fifteen A's, seven A's and seven A's. He completed his bachelor's degree and doctorate at the Faculty of Law of the Central University of Madrid. His thesis was entitled The system of penalties determined a posteriori in science and in life .

After obtaining a scholarship from the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, he traveled to Switzerland, France and Germany. On this trip he met the eminent Austrian penalist Franz von Liszt.

Teaching activity

Caricatured by Pellicer in the Madrid newspaper The Impartial (1925)

He was a professor of Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law of the Central University of Madrid. Due to his protest against the harassment suffered by Miguel de Unamuno by the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, he was confined in the Chafarinas Islands in 1926. He then resigned his professorship in protest against the interference of the dictatorship in the university.

Political activity

In 1931 he joined the PSOE and was elected deputy to the Constituent Cortes for the constituency of Granada (province), presiding over the parliamentary commission in charge of preparing the new republican Constitution. Director of the Institute of Criminal Studies, created by Victoria Kent, he participated in the drafting of the Penal Code of 1932. He Belongs to the so-called "moderate wing"; of the PSOE, he was vice president of the Cortes after the elections of February 1936, in which the Popular Front won. In June of that same year he was elected vice president of the Executive Commission of his party.

Attack

As a deputy and socialist candidate for vice president of Parliament, he suffered a terrorist attack on March 12, 1936, claimed responsibility for by the Spanish Falange of the JONS. It was the first attack by the Falange against a deputy from the new government majority. He saved his life, but not his bodyguard, Jesús Gisbert, who died on the spot. A month later, the Falange ordered the assassination of the investigating magistrate of the case, Manuel Pedregal Luege.

During the Spanish Civil War, he held diplomatic posts for the Republic in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as representing Spain before the League of Nations.

He was removed as a professor, without any contradictory process, by means of a Ministerial Order in February 1939, together with other professors:

... is definitively separated by being public and notorious the disabling of university professors who will be mentioned to the new regime implanted in Spain, not only by its actions in the areas they have suffered and in which they suffer Marxist domination, but also by its pertinence anti-nationalist and anti-Spanish politics in the times preceding the Glorious National Movement. The evidence of his pernicious behaviors for the country makes absolutely useless the procedural guarantees that, in another case constitute the fundamental condition in all prosecutions, and therefore, this Ministry has decided to definitively separate from the service and to discharge in their respective scales the lords: Luis Jiménez de Asúa, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, Felipe Sánchez Román and José Castillejo Duarte, Professors of Law; Pablo Azcárate Flórez, Demófilo de Buen Lozano, Mariano Gómez González and Wenceslao Roces Suárez, professors of law

Order of February 4, 1939, Ministry of National Education.

Exile in Argentina

After the war was exiled in Argentina, where he continued his teaching career at the National University of La Plata and at the National University of the Coast, in addition to directing the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology of the University of Buenos Aires until the coup Military of 1966. He directed the Magazine of Criminal Law and Criminology until his death. Its Treaty of Criminal Law in seven volumes has been considered one of the masterpieces of the subject. Referring to it, Brazilian criminal Nelson Hungary said:

If all the writings on criminal law were lost because of an atomic catastrophe, but the Jiménez de Asúa Treaty was saved, future generations would have lost nothing.

Nelson Hungary

He maintained a close relationship with the Argentine reformist student organizations. Among his disciples were Enrique Bacigalupo, a former member of the Supreme Court of Spain and Guillermo Estévez Boero, who would be president of the Argentine University Federation (FUA) and later national deputy for the Socialist Party of Argentina (PSA); and Manuel de Rivacoba, professor of Criminal Law and minister without portfolio in the government in exile of the Spanish Republic.

In 1962 he was appointed president of the Spanish Republic in exile, a position he held until his death in Buenos Aires on November 17, 1970.

Works

• The criminal law of the future. Unification of criminal law in Switzerland (1916) Madrid, Reus
• The state of necessity: hunger in criminal laws (1922) Madrid.
• The state of necessity en criminal matter with special references to Spanish and Argentine legislations (1922) Buenos Aires. Graphic workshops of the National Prison.
• Criminal Law in the Republic of Peru (1926) Valladolid-Madrid
• A trip to Brazil (1929) Madrid, Reus
• At the service of criminal law (1930) Madrid, Morata
• At the service of the New Generation (1930) Madrid, Morata
• Notes from a confined (1930) Madrid, Mundo Latino
• Legal theory of crime (1931)
• Defense of a Rebellion, Report to the Supreme Council of the Army and Marine as Mandate of D. Santiago Casares Quiroga (1931) Madrid, Morata
• Criminal psychoanalysis Buenos Aires, Losada.
• The criminalist (1941-1949) Buenos Aires, La Ley, 8 vols.
• The Political Constitution of Spanish Democracy (1942) Santiago de Chile, Ercilla
• The law and the crime. Criminal dogmatic course (1945) Caracas, Andrés Bello
• The Constitution of Spanish Democracy and the Regional Problem (1946)
• Criminal Law Treaty (1949-1963) Buenos Aires, Losada, 7 vols.
• Lombroso (1960), Buenos Aires: Perrot
• Freedom of love (Euthanasia and Eugenics Trial - 1946 - 560 pp.)
• Soviet Criminal Law (1947) Buenos Aires, Tea, 354 pp.
• The Indetermined Sentence (1947) Buenos Aires, Tea, 450 pp.