From Free Will to Social Defense (or from Cesare Beccaria to Cesare Lombroso): Julio Herrera and the Criminal Law Codification in Argentina (1903-1922)

Abstract

This paper aims to scrutinize the views of Julio Herrera—one of the most prominent Argentine criminal law jurists of the first half of the 20th century, oddly overlooked by legal historiography—on two criminal codes. First, in 1903, before his fellow senators, Herrera harshly questioned the code in force at the time (styled “Tejedor Code” after its author) for being based on the ideas of the Classical School of Criminology and suggested a complete overhaul. Some years later, in 1922, in a series of lectures delivered in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, he praised the criminal code then in force—approved a year earlier—in which he noticed the influence of the new ideas of the Italian Positivist School and the German Criminal Policy doctrine. Despite giving a favorable opinion on the code’s general part, he strongly criticized many of its specific sections. We believe that an analysis of Herrera’s remarks before the Senate, in his lectures at the two most prominent law schools in the country, as well as those views contained in his written work, especially La reforma penal, published in 1911, will provide us with some insight on the prevailing ideology at the time, the foreign influences, discussions and transformations Criminal Law in Argentina was subject to during the first decades of the 20th century.