Luis Jiménez de Asúa

Born in Calle de Hortaleza in Madrid, he took his degree and doctorate at the law faculty of the Central University, and a grant from the Board for Advanced Studies took him to Switzerland, France and Germany, where he met the Austrian penal jurist Franz von Liszt. He became professor of criminal law at the Central University, but in 1926 his protest against the Primo de Rivera dictatorship’s treatment of Miguel de Unamuno got him banished to the Chafarinas Islands, and he resigned his chair against the dictatorship’s interference in the university. In 1928 he published Freedom to Love and the Right to Die: Essays of a Criminologist on Eugenics, Euthanasia and Endocrinology.

Joining the PSOE in 1931, he was elected to the Constituent Cortes for Granada and chaired the parliamentary committee that drafted the Republican constitution. As director of the Institute of Penal Studies founded by Victoria Kent he took part in drafting the 1932 penal code. He had long studied the “dangerous state” before crime, proposing in 1922 a “duality of codes”, one preventive and one punitive, and on that basis wrote, with Mariano Ruiz-Funes, the new draft of the 1933 Law on Vagrants and Delinquents, which the Franco regime later used against homosexuals. A member of the PSOE’s moderate wing, he became vice-president of the Cortes after the February 1936 elections and in June vice-president of the party’s executive; on 12 March he survived a Falangist assassination attempt in which his bodyguard Jesús Gisbert was killed.

During the civil war he served the Republic as a diplomat in Poland and Czechoslovakia and represented Spain at the League of Nations. Exiled to Argentina in 1939, he taught at the universities of La Plata and the Littoral and at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology of the University of Buenos Aires until the military coup of 1966, and wrote a seven-volume Treatise on Criminal Law. From 1962 until his death in 1970 he was president of the Republic in exile.