José Antonio González i Casanova
Spanish jurist, lawyer and professor

José Antonio González i Casanova (2 December 1935 – 29 October 2021) was a Spanish lawyer, politician, constitutional law academic, and writer, known for being one of the drafters of the Spanish Constitution in 1978.
Biography and career
González was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1935. He studied at the local elite school "Jesuïtes Sarrià", where he met Alfonso Carlos Comín. Despite coming from a national Catholic family and having a military uncle who was shot for being part of the Civil War Nationalist cause, during Franco's regime González was part of the Popular Liberation Front, a left-wing, clandestine and anti-Francoist organization. Later, he co-founded the clandestine Workers' Front of Catalonia (FOC) in 1962.
After graduating in law from the University of Barcelona, Manuel Jiménez de Parga hired González to be an assistant professor of political law at the university. He received his doctorate in 1963, with his thesis entitled "The people's committee of the Yugoslavian commune". In 1967, he became chair of the political law department at the University of Santiago de Compostela. At that time, he collaborated with the newspaper La Voz de Galicia.
In 1970, after the dissolution of FOC, González joined the Socialist Party of Catalonia-Congress (PSC–Congrés), and later, the Socialists' Party of Catalonia (PSC).
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This entry incorporates text from “José Antonio González i Casanova” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.