The UB professor linked law and literature in his speech.
José Esteve, professor of Administrative Law at the UB, was awarded an honorary doctorate this Friday, May 3, by the University of Granada. In his acceptance speech, Esteve reflected on the relationship between law, science and new technologies to conclude that scientistic approaches to laws should be avoided. He defended law to be a human construction that can be enriched with contributions from fields such as literary creation.
Esteve noted that with literature "we can build the counter-offensive to recover and maintain the human dominion on a law that will operate —an unavoidable future— in environments of a dense uncertainty and complexity, with complex technological elements". He finished his speech with a tribute to the poet Federico García Lorca. He explained how, after being arrested in 1936, spent some of the last hours of his life in the rooms that are now part of the Faculty of Law of the University of Granada and which at that time were the headquarters of the civil government. "The seed of Federico is planted, at a high price, in the Faculty of Law", concluded Esteve.
José Esteve's sponsor in the ceremony was lecturer Estanislao Arana. He highlighted the international outreach of José Esteve's work, and how he linked administrative law to other disciplines, as well as his "visionary" ability to anticipate the most relevant problems for society. Esteve's work on relevant issues the State and the contemporary society are facing is reflected in works such as Técnica, riesgo y Derecho, El desconcierto del Leviatán, La nueva relación entre Estado y Sociedad and, more recently, El pensamiento antiparlamentario y la formación del Derecho público en Europa and Hay jueces en Berlín.
