page_title: Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola
section_title: Theorist of law
hierarchical_section_title: Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola / Theorist of law
caption_attribution_description: English: Francisco Suarez, S.I. (1548-1617) Suárez is considered the most brilliant and influential early-modern philosophers. He wrote on metaphysics, theology and epistemology. Suárez was born at Granada of Spanish-Jewish descent. Suárez joined the Jesuits. He taught at Rome and in Spain and Portugal. His most important philosophical work was the Disputationes metaphysicae (1597). De lege ac Deo legislatore (About law and God the legislator,1612) summarized a series of lectures that Suarez gave in the 1590's about divine and human law. It influenced political philosophy and international law.
context_page_description: Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola Gómez was a Spanish scholar and a Carlist politician. He is considered one of top intellectuals of the Francoist era, though not necessarily of Francoism. As theorist of law he represented the school known as iusnaturalismo, as historian of political ideas he focused mostly on Hispanidad, and as theorist of politics he pursued a Traditionalist approach. As a Carlist he remained an ideologue rather than a political protagonist.
context_section_description: Tejada is considered member of the natural law school and its key representative during the Franco era, influenced by early modern Spanish jurists like Francisco Suarez but mostly following the Aquinas; he regarded own work merely a gloss to the opus of St. Thomas. Hence, within iusnaturalismo he is classified as representative of Neo-Scholastic school, as opposed to Axiological, Neo-Kantian and Innovative Natural Law schools. Together with Michel Villey deemed a renovator of classical European iusnaturalismo of the mid-20th century, Tejada clearly distinguished own vision from "iusnaturalismo racionalista". Within this framework, he agreed that the role of jurisprudence was discovering rather than inventing.
  Tejada's work consisted of systematizing concepts falling into ontology, anthropology, logic and axiology. His original contribution was merging them into a complete system and introducing a set of own concepts. He is considered not a mere follower but a scholar who developed Thomist juridical philosophy, credited for attempting a synthesis with existentialist school; some even view him as representative of legal Catholic Existentialism, a definition not accepted universally. He is noted as the moving spirit behind emergence of Asociación Internacional de Iusnaturalistas Hispánicos "Felipe II". Last but not least, Tejada is acknowledged as the one who inspired a number of scholars, both in Spain and in wider Hispanic realm, though not all his proposals have been accepted by his followers.
   
  For Tejada the law resulted from God assuming a decisive role, but rendering it possible to find acceptable reasons for an objective-value-based human agency; natural law stemmed from conjunction of divine power and human liberty. Its purpose was twofold: salvation and vocation, corresponding to justice in relations to God and security in relations to other people. Though some scholars point to some confusion as to the terms used, most agree that for Tejada law was "la norma política con contenido justo", colloquially described as where politics and ethics overlapped, a sovereign normative system related but clearly separate from religion. Some students conclude that Tejada was close to normativism, others find this suggestion too restrictive and claim that for him, law was far more than a norm. A distinctive thread of his jurisprudential discourse was its application to vastly distinct cultural realms, though he attempted to sublimate a specific Hispanic natural law.
  Tejada kept writing on theory of law throughout all of his academic career; his first contribution was published in 1942 and his new pieces are being published posthumously. Except two volumes of Historia de la filosofía del derecho y del Estado (1946), until the very late of his life Tejada's works were mostly articles in specialized reviews, lectures delivered at jurisprudential conferences or compendium-like textbooks intended for students. Tejada's vastly erudite opus magnum, a systematic in-depth lecture gathering all his ideas on law theory was Tratado de filosofia del derecho, published in Seville in two volumes respectively in 1974 and 1977. It is not clear how many of his almost 400 works fall into theory of law, though their number might near one hundred.
caption: Francisco Suarez
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