[1] After realizing the need to clarify the normative problems involved in some of those issues, he was led to embrace a model based on the explicit adoption of principles of justice and social morality, rejecting the predominant German-inspired "dogmatic" approach.
His need to provide a liberal justification for criminal law practice thus lead him to moral philosophy, and to the development of an original "consensual" theory of punishment which combined the merits of the retributive and utilitarian (see deterrence) varieties while avoiding their respective difficulties.
His theoretical activities, however, were not forgotten: in 1984 he published his monumental Ética y derechos humanos,[5] dedicated to Alfonsín, where he provided a comprehensive exposition of his moral thought; divided in three parts, it dealt with normative and applied ethics, as well as with meta-ethics.
This last field he expanded in a separate volume,[6] where he adopted a constructivist approach that attempted to derive his fundamental ethical principles from the presuppositions of moral discourse, in a manner that put him, as he said, "between Rawls and Habermas".
This tragedy killed a man who appeared to be at the peak of his productivity: the year before he had published two books,[7] served as editor to two others,[8] and had given the manuscripts of a couple more to his friend Owen Fiss, who assumed the responsibility of readying them for publication.