MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LEGAL HISTORY

Knowledge and understanding

The course aims to examine closely some historical key-issues to understand the legal experience. The concepts of power, authority, individual right, property, contract, code, justice, identity, normality, deviance will be investigated within some specific social-historical contexts. The course will underline how the mutual relationships between private and public, rights and duties, customs and codifications, protections of civil liberties and repression have produced that peculiar result of legal modernity known as “State”.

Applying knowledge and understanding

For the students who – having attended the basic course of medieval and modern legal history – have already experienced a teaching methodology directed to combine teaching and learning, the course will be focused on making profit of their knowledge about European legal experience to develop critical thought and autonomy in handling texts that concern the connection between the problem of truth and the complex constitution of modern subjectivity.

Lectures. In the second part of the course some issues will be deepened through seminars with the active participation of students.

The course aims to deepen some key historical themes for the understanding of legal experience. The concepts of power, authority, individual right, property, contract, code, criminal justice, constitution, international relations will be investigated from the perspective of their articulation within specific historical and local contexts. The course will highlight how the changing and mutual relations between public and private, rights and duties, customs and codifications, protections of civil liberties and repression have produced that peculiar system of legal modernity called "State".

The course will, also, address special attention to the topic of the forced confinement (domicilio coatto). It will show how in Italy, between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, in the criminal policy, in the elaboration of legal science and in police practices, there has been an emergency logic that has had in administrative confinement of people for an indefinite period of time, even in the absence of criminal convictions and without warranties of contradictory, its centre of gravity. The house arrest of the institute was the old rut in which they were formed all subsequent measurements to it homogeneous (from exile forced to stay). The forced confinement as a legal institute was the historical rut in which all subsequent and homogeneous measures were formed (from internment to compulsory stay). Therefore, the understanding of the dynamics that have generated it and that, despite its limitations and the harsh criticism received, have kept it alive for several decades is crucial to measure the impact on the penal system of logics based on suspicion and prevention.

1. M. Fioravanti (cura di), Lo Stato moderno in Europa. Istituzioni e diritto, Laterza, Roma - Bari, 2015¹⁴, (Chapters III “Giustizia e amministrazione” and VI “Lavoro e impresa” can be omitted) for a total number of 150 pages.
2. E De Cristofaro (cura di), Il Domicilio coatto. Ordine pubblico e politiche di sicurezza in Italia dall’Unità alla Repubblica, Bonanno, Acireale – Roma, 2015, (Chapter XI “La penalità emergenziale nell’Italia repubblicana. L’«eterno ritorno» delle misure di prevenzione” can be omitted) for a total number of 250 pages.