For me, as perhaps for many other people who treated him personally, the philosophy of law had a human face, in reality very human, that of Elías Diaz (1934-2025), whose cordiality and bonhomy have always been legendary. In the beginning he collaborated with Joaquín Ruíz Jiménez and José Luis López Aranguren. Together with his endless work, his legacy also has a solid integrated intellectual lineage verbigracia by Manuel Atienza, Javier de Lucas, Eusebio Fernández, Liborio Hierro, Paco Laporta, Gregorio Pesces-Barba, Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño, Alfonso Ruíz Miguel, Cristina Sánchez Sánchez , Julián Sauquillo and Virgilio Zapatero.
I had the opportunity to treat him thanks to his endearing friendship with Javier Muguerza. In fact, at that time, in the 1980s, the area of moral philosophy and political philosophy also included the philosophy of law, for its obvious and fertile interconnections. From that fruitful dialogue, for example, for example, a debate on obedience that is due to the law opened by Felipe González Vicen, were born, The dissent alternative proposed by Javier Muguerza or the tenths Aranguren conferences dictated Elías Díaz at the CSIC Student Residence and were published in number 26 of the magazine Isegoriaunder the significant title of State reason and state reasons.
In 2001 Elías Díaz wrote things like these: “Give scientific capitalismit is necessary to completely take the perspective of general interests; and, within them, those of those broad social sectors endowed with much less powers and possibilities. The ethics of the enlightened values of freedom, equality, fraternity (solidarity), as well as the security that derives from the social cohesion itself constitute the basis of these good state reasons (which oppose the bad State reason)”.
It is obvious that it should be remembered and reread their writings, as the editors of Elías Díaz: his books and his critics (2013). His political commitment was also with ethics and always had a marked academic accent. He was co -founder of Notebooks for dialogue and directed in its beginnings (1973) the magazine System. Certainly, the rule of law did not conceive without counting human rights, as testimated by the conference he issued with Javier Muguerza at the Juan March Foundation (1999), and that is the trail traveled by those who consider him a teacher. It is no accident that a doctoral thesis whose eloquent title is Elías Díaz: Between ethics and politics.
There is a traumatic event that unfortunately is well known. While they talked on the phone from their respective university offices, Elías Díaz heard the shots that sugated the life of Francisco Tomás and Valiente, vilely killed by a Etarra terrorist at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Interestingly, Tomás and brave had just put a wonderful prologue to a book edited by the Ministry of Justice, Beccaria’s crimes and sorrowsthat text that revolutionized criminal law and that Voltaire did not stop commenting on his fight against infamy. A fight that Elías Díaz made from the history of political-legal and moral ideas.