Autonomy was an important notion in Italian legal doctrine from the mid-19th century to the fall of Fascism and the enactment of theRepublican Constitution in 1948. Its use and meaning, however, were different according to the disciplinary field and the goal that jurists aimed to achieve.This paper will provide some examples concerning: (1) the role played by the concept of autonomy within public and constitutional law, first as an argument to emphasize characters of a national legal identity after political unification in 1861 and later– especially in the second decade of the 20th century–as a way of underlining the pluralism of (legal) orders within the state; (2) how autonomy impacted private law and the Civil Code of 1865 by both reshaping abstract formulas in contract law and contributing to creating separate disciplines such as labor law; (3) the theoretical struggle over the autonomy of will as the philosophical and legal justification for punishment, which adherents to the classical school and advocates of the positivistic school were confronted with from the 1880s until World War I.
Construction and De-construction of Legal Identity: Different Notions of Autonomy in Italian Legal Thought (19th–20th Centuries)
M. Pifferi
2024
Abstract
Autonomy was an important notion in Italian legal doctrine from the mid-19th century to the fall of Fascism and the enactment of theRepublican Constitution in 1948. Its use and meaning, however, were different according to the disciplinary field and the goal that jurists aimed to achieve.This paper will provide some examples concerning: (1) the role played by the concept of autonomy within public and constitutional law, first as an argument to emphasize characters of a national legal identity after political unification in 1861 and later– especially in the second decade of the 20th century–as a way of underlining the pluralism of (legal) orders within the state; (2) how autonomy impacted private law and the Civil Code of 1865 by both reshaping abstract formulas in contract law and contributing to creating separate disciplines such as labor law; (3) the theoretical struggle over the autonomy of will as the philosophical and legal justification for punishment, which adherents to the classical school and advocates of the positivistic school were confronted with from the 1880s until World War I.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
