Presentation

Released in August of 2012, and originally published in each three months, civilistica.com represents the joint effort of scholars from different generations on behalf of the creation of an online repository of academic material of excellence, aiming to facilitate the access and to increase the diffusion of adequate instruments to the apprehension of the each time faster changes of the contemporaneous civil law. The journal gathers articles, academic papers, opinions, jurisprudence commentaries, reviews, bibliographical indications, videos and eventual links, selected to provide current and creative tools for the process of restructuration of the civil law around its greatest value: the guardianship of the human person.

From 2014, the periodicity turned biannual, due to the necessity to adapt to the criteria of Capes to national journals, in which is concerned the Qualis, a ranking classification that establishes layers of qualification for scientific journal of different areas. The changes brought by the Web Qualis criteria do not affect the content presented by civilistica.com in any way, besides its improvement, in order to increase its factor of impact. It was established, then, a blind peer review system, aiming to reach an even bigger care when choosing the content offered to the readers; the dialogue with the most diverse regions of Brazil and other countries was intensified. This in order to seek different works from more diverse formation institutions and juridical thought; the editorial committee was so introduced. It is formed by renowned jurists from distinct generations, judges and professors of Brazilian and foreign universities. Such effort is not different from that one of the contemporaneous jurist that, when searching space to the creativity (in a world in which it is demanded each time more), needs to deal with the formal limitations indispensible to the coexisting in a maturing society. Although, the value elected as the editorial guide since the foundation of the journal was kept: the human person and his/her entire guardianship as the base of the civil law on the current days.

The contemporary civil law, under this perspective, is found, actually, split in two: one driven to the economically appreciated relations, and other towards the off balance sheet nature. The adoption of this distinction in the private law – inevitable outcome of the option for the human dignity as a higher value on the ordering – generates repercussions that start to be better known, and this outlines the next steps of the way: to build mechanisms for the discipline of non materialistic juridical relations, as well as new parameters to measure its guardianship merit.

However, it is not about affirming the existence of a fragmented civil law. On the contrary, the civil law has revealed itself as the juridical field that best accepted the responsibility, in recent years, through the guardianship and the promotion of human dignity. And, it is exactly in its global efforts, towards to the protection of the human person that it is possible to find a unity in the contemporary civil law.

If, previously, the property study and its ways of acquisition and transference would give an identity to the civil law, currently it is the worry with the personality guardianship – directly, in the juridical relations said to be existential, or in the property juridical relations – that defines the importance of the role of civil doctrine.

As it happens in every transition period, it is not possible to forecast clearly what are the next stages of this evolutional trajectory of the civil law. We live, as said by Zigmunt Bauman, an interregno, a moment when the existent instruments are not useful anymore to this present time, but we have not created the new tools to face the current problems from the new world configuration of the mass societies, the new ethical in relation to the consume, the anxiety of the new generations in face of the uncertain future. In the same way, it happens to the civil law. There is the necessity of rebuilding traditional civil institutes and of building new paradigms for the issues that cannot be satisfied with the traditional techniques. The complexity increases as the adoption of the human person as the reference point makes daily the advent of new juridical significant situations (new threats, new damages, new interest worthy guardianship and so on).

It is know, however, that the option for the guardianship of human dignity represents a juridical and political choice of which is not possible to retreat. And, despite the unpredictability of the future, it is necessary to think over the problems that show up to the interpreter according to this great value, driving force of the trajectory. More than just restructure old theoretical constructions with the minimal efforts of updating, a juridical journal must be capable of presenting the new elements of the scientific thought, as well as to identify the classical texts that still hold relation with the present moment, revisiting them. This way, it is about uniting all the available instruments for the construction of a path that, if it does not offer lots of certainties in relation to its arrival point, has, at least, its well-outlined direction.

The journal purposes to assemble this multiplicity of relevant factors for the construction of the contemporary civil law. The title symbolizes its main editorial guidelines: the universalizing name, understandable in many languages, full of certainty that the exchange of experiences is the best (if not the only) way, and the extension “.com”, which indicates its digital format and its openness to new realities that present themselves to the civilistic reflection. Aware of the historical relativity of its own content and conscious of its mission, civilistica.com invites the reader to discover and to build, jointly, the next stages.

Our Logo:

Giovanni Pico, Conde de Mirandola, whose face appears in the logo of civilistica.com, were a philosopher that enunciated in 1486, at the age of 23, his famous Oratio de Hominis Dignitate, This was after considered as the founding speech of the humanist renaissance, because of its commitment to the valorization and philosophical promotion of the human being. His text, which had an anthropocentric character, despite its countless allusions to rathio theological, alongside of ratio philosophica, did not establish the so far common relation of subordination between creator and creature. So, it innovatively indicated that the human dignity were not because of the similarity to God, but, on the contrary, to the singular nature of the human.