Luis Recasens Siches

Luis Recasens Siches was a Guatemalan-Spanish jurist and philosopher of law who lived from 1903 to 1977. He studied at universities in Madrid, Vienna, Berlin and Rome, served as a deputy during Spain's Second Republic, and went into exile in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War, where he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Colegio de Mexico until his death. Recasens Siches moved beyond neo-Kantian formalism by drawing on the phenomenological value theory of Max Scheler and the vital reason of Jose Ortega y Gasset alongside the influence of Hans Kelsen and Rudolf Stammler, developing what he called the logic of the reasonable, an approach mediating between abstract legal formalism and the practical, human application of law, set out at length in his General Treatise on Philosophy of Law of 1959.