About This Book
This book of professor Héctor Turuhpial Cariello is a study about the so-called political acts or acts of government, which surpasses and backdates the origin of these acts—immune to judicial control—much further back than the well-known ruling delivered in the Lafitte affair by the French Council of State in its praetorian activity, decided on May 1, 1882.
In the First Chapter, he presents the germinal seed of these acts, offering a detailed analysis of the Roman Commissarial Dictatorship, distinguishing it from the Sovereign Dictatorship, even though both constituted institutional mechanisms rather than de facto situations. In this chapter, he makes a precise reference to the immunity of the decrees during the Commissarial Dictatorship in relation to the two legal remedies that Roman Law provided to suspend any act—both of which, however, proved ineffective against dictatorial decrees—namely, the intercessio and the provocatio ad populum.
In the Second Chapter, he sets forth the differences between the medieval institutions of Gubernaculum and Iurisdictio, highlighting Locke’s exposition and his conception of the distinctions within the Executive Power—specifically, between the Governing Power and the Federative Power.
The Third Chapter presents a discussion clarifying the characterization of Acts of Government as compared to the so-called Institutional Acts—a thesis developed, on the one hand, by Dromi, and on the other, an analysis of the relevance of the judicial activity in forming a notion of political acts.
In the Fourth Chapter, the author fully addresses the jurisprudential construction of the notion of political or governmental acts by the French Council of State and its counterpart in Anglo-North American law, represented by the political questions, concluding in the Fifth Chapter with a reference to the jurisprudential evolution of such acts in Venezuela.
