The jurist’s position regarding the State’s punitive system today is eminently critical. The Criminology of social reaction, by subjecting to analysis the police-judicial system itself and the mechanics of drafting penal laws, sparked a remarkable impact, necessarily imposing upon the jurist a critical re-evaluation of their activity. It is to this subject that the study by Francisco Muñoz Conde, professor at the University of Seville, refers, with which we open the doctrine section in this issue. Similarly featured in this section is a study by Prof. Juarez Cirino dos Santos, from our permanent editorial board, on abortion—a topic that has garnered widespread attention in recent years due to important legislative changes introduced in many countries. The novel issue posed by transsexualism, from the perspective of surgical intervention, is examined in a legal opinion by the director of this journal, focusing on the legal-penal aspects of the matter.In the Current Affairs and Communications section, we publish a lecture by Judge Ederson de Mello Serra, professor at the Cândido Mendes Law School, on the highly timely topic of violence. Here the reader will also find the interesting paper presented by Professors Nilo Batista and Yolanda Catão regarding the state court of first instance in Rio de Janeiro. This work was presented at the 1st Regional Conference of the OAB-RJ. The section concludes with a study by Dr. Fernando de Almeida Pedroso, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office of São Paulo, on conditional public penal action, offering an exhaustive technical-legal examination of the subject. In the Research section, two important documents appear. The first concerns a project for a comparative investigation on white-collar crime in Latin America, authored by Prof. Lola Aniyar de Castro, from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Zulia (Maracaibo, Venezuela). This project is to be carried out by several scientific institutions across the continent, having been approved at a meeting held in Bogotá in 1978. Our Institute has joined this initiative and is set to sponsor the group’s next meeting, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in July 1979. In this same section, the reader will find the research project on violent crime in Rio de Janeiro, which our Institute is also currently undertaking. Authored by Prof. Juarez Cirino dos Santos, this project addresses an issue that is very much at the top of the agenda. The reader will also find in this issue our regular sections featuring news, bibliographic reviews, and case law. The latter is enriched with two excellent commentaries by Dr. Celso Delmanto (on judicial pardon) and Prosecutor Cláudio L. Fonteles (on jurisdiction over the trial and prosecution of crimes committed by and against officers and enlisted personnel of state militias). In the section on Laws and Projects, we reproduce the South American Agreement on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, recently promulgated by decree along with its Additional Protocols, as well as the important Law No. 6,544, which amended the Military Penal Code and the Military Penal Procedure Code. Heleno Cláudio Fragoso
Note: This text is an English translation of the original preface published in Portuguese in the Revista de Direito Penal.