Spanish jurist, professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Granada since 1941 and later of Sociology at the Faculty of Political Science in Madrid. He lived in Granada at the beginning of the 20th century where he met at the tertulia of El Rinconcillo, Fernando de los Ríos, Manuel de Falla (of which he was secretary), Federico García Lorca and Joaquín Amigo, among others. He had a literary vocation as a young man, but abandoned it for that of jurist and sociologist, something that Lorca tried to prevent, since he valued him as a poet and as a person. Their friendship cooled from this fact. The Defensor de Granada opened its doors to him. He also collaborated in gallo, a magazine of the Granada artistic avant-garde directed by Federico and Francisco García Lorca.
He had a literary vocation as a young man, but abandoned it for that of jurist and sociologist, which Lorca tried to prevent, since he valued him as a poet and as a person. Their friendship cooled from this fact.
He was born in Cebreros, Ávila, in 1910, although he spent much of his childhood and youth in Huelva. He studied law in Granada. With a scholarship from this University, he studied in Berlin. In March 1933, he was appointed temporary assistant professor at the Law School in Granada. In 1933, the university entrusted him with the vacant chair of History of Law and during 1935-1936, a course on the History of the Philosophy of Law. In 1940, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Seville and, in 1950, he was Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Granada. He also held the position of vice-dean of the Faculty of Political, Economic and Commercial Sciences of Madrid (until 1957).
He was secretary to Manuel de Falla. After the Civil War, during the period of the political purges, he was dismissed from the law clerkship. Falla asked Pemán to have his post reinstated. He moved to Madrid and there he devoted himself to sociology, and was very close personally and in terms of thought to Xavier Zubiri. His sociological work has been valued as a fundamental milestone in the definitive establishment of this science in Spain.
Among his most outstanding publications are Hermann Heller (his doctoral thesis, from 1940); Profile and Figures of Spanish Legal and Political Thought (from the same year); German Philosophy in the Last Fifty Years published in 1943, as well as Suárez and the Modern World and, in 1959, For a Sociology of the Spanish Family was published.
He died in Madrid in 1959, at the age of 49. He suffered from a deep depression.
