naugural lecture given by Professor D. José Manuel Ruiz-Rico Ruiz on the occasion of the opening of the 2023-2024 academic year at the University of Malaga. Law is normally guided by legal principles, rules, or maxims that can be accepted by the majority and are often based on common sense or maxims of experience. From the body of civil law or private law in general, two key ideas or basic principles can be deduced: on the one hand, freedom, understood as an expression of so-called private autonomy, or the ability of citizens to make their own personal and financial decisions and to regulate themselves through contracts or legal transactions; on the other hand, equality, understood as a check or counterbalance to the principle of freedom, that is, the need to protect individuals in situations (specific or general) of vulnerability, insofar as the law in general—as is traditionally said—is an instrument for guaranteeing the weakest against the brute force of the most powerful (physically, economically, or materially).