18/08/2026
The School of Salamanca has been hailed as the cradle of international law and criticised as a legal fig leaf for empire. Our director Thomas Duve argues that both accounts tend to reduce the School to its contribution to international law and overlook the authors who espoused the same ideas in Mexico, Córdoba or the Philippines. Moreover, the authors in Salamanca were part of a larger discourse. He and his department have held this view for years; on 14 August he explained it to a wider audience in El Mundo, a leading Spanish daily.
Both interpretations, he adds, are shaped very much by contemporary politics – neither national pride and the aim to defend Catholic Moral Theology on the one hand and postcolonial critique are not free of anachronism.
El Mundo's editors placed all this within the context of the current debates on artificial intelligence. According to Duve, one particular characteristic of the School of Salamanca was to develop a legal thinking from a theological and philosophical reflection about the human being. In a similar way we will have to ask ourselves today fundamental questions: What defines a person? What about rights for animals, robots, and the nature?
These questions cannot be answered by drawing on 16th century theology or philosophy. Duve cites Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s famous dictum: a secular constitution stands on foundations it cannot itself supply. It is, thus, even more important to understand the foundations of our legal culture to be able to develop a discourse which builds on our moral intuitions. This is even more important in our times of a rivalry between cultural and legal systems on a global scale.
The interview is in Spanish:
Luces para la ConstituciónThomas Duve: "La reflexión sobre la condición humana es más actual que nunca con la IA"Director del Instituto Max Planck para la Historia y Teoría del Derecho, es una autoridad mundial en la Escuela de Salamanca, cuya investigación lidera en el prestigioso centro alem...
