The Italian Legal System


Book Description

For fifty years, the first edition of The Italian Legal System has been the gold standard among English-language works on the Italian legal system. The book's original authors, Mauro Cappelletti, John Henry Merryman, and Joseph M. Perillo, provided not only an overview of Italian law, but a definition of the field, together with an important contribution to the general literature on comparative law. The book explains the unique "Italian style" in doctrine, law, and interpretation and includes an extremely well-written introduction to Italian legal history, government, the legal profession, and civil procedure and evidence. In this fully-updated and revised second edition, authors Michael A. Livingston, Pier Giuseppe Monateri, and Francesco Parisi describe the substantial changes in Italian law and society in the intervening five decades—including the creation and impact of the European Union, as well as important advances in comparative law methodology. The second edition poses timely, relevant questions of whether and to what extent the unique Italian style of law has survived the pressures of European unification, American influence, and the globalization of law and society in the intervening period. The Italian Legal System, Second Edition is an important and stimulating resource for those with specific interest in Italy and those with a more general interest in comparative law and the globalization process.




Introduction to Italian Law


Book Description

Introduction to the Laws.....Series Volume 4 This is a methodologically advanced introduction to the main features of the Italian Legal System. Its eighteen chapters cover all the significant changes and innovations that have recently taken place, including: a new system of private international law; a greatly altered and expanded body of family law; a new code of criminal procedure; fundamental changes in civil procedure; the effects of European legislation on Italian municipal law; the reformation of administrative law; and the latest computer-assisted research tools and techniques used to research Italian law. Written for academics and lawyers alike, this book is an indispensable tool for those wishing to grasp the context of Italian legal activity. Written by Italian experts at the top of their respective fields, An Introduction to Italian Law is a readable yet technically sophisticated and critical discussion of the systemic features that make the Italian legal system a landmark of the civil law tradition.




Federalism and Constitutional Law


Book Description

This volume examines the relationship between central government and local institutions, taking Italy as a case study to present a comparative perspective on how the Italian experience has influenced the global developments of federal and regional states. As the country with the longest standing regional system, Italy has a lot to tell countries that are dealing with similar issues in present times. Adopting a theoretical/analytical approach coupled with comparative analysis, this volume critically reflects on the changes brought to the Italian system of government by the reform of Title V of the Italian constitution, the reasons why further decentralisation has been resisted and offers a comparative overview of the place and contributions that the Italian experience has brought to the global debate on regionalism and federalism. The book is divided into two parts: Part I distils the essence of the evolution of Italian regionalism and the respective debate before and after 2001. While focusing on Italy, the various chapters situate it within the global framework of discussion. Part II reflects on how the Italian regional constitutional architecture contributes to the global debate, particularly focusing on the main innovations brought about by constitutional reform. The book will be essential reading for researchers, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of constitutional law and politics, and federalism. Chapters 5 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003104469




The Challenge of Inter-legality


Book Description

The first book-length treatment to describe and explain how legal orders can be interwoven and what to do about it. The volume discusses inter-legality in different legal fields, situates it within political and legal theory, and provides a normative assessment.




A History of International Law in Italy


Book Description

This volume critically reassesses the history and impact of international law in Italy. It examines how Italy's engagement with international law has been influenced and cross-fertilized by global dynamics, in terms of theories, methodologies, or professional networks. It asks to what extent historical and political turning points influenced this engagement, especially where scholars were part of broader academic and public debates or even active participants in the role of legal advisers or politicians. It explores how international law was used or misused by relevant actors in such contexts. Bringing together scholars specialized in international law and legal history, this volume first provides a historical examination of the theoretical legal analysis produced in the Italian context, exploring its main features, and dissident voices. The second section assesses the impact on international law studies of key historical and political events involving Italy, both international and domestically; and, conversely, how such events influenced perceptions of international law. Finally, a concluding section places the preceding analysis within a broader, contemporary perspective. This volume weighs in on in the growing debate on the need to explore international law from comparative and local viewpoints. It shows how regional, national, and local contexts have contributed to shaping international legal rules, institutions, and doctrines; and how these in turn influenced local solutions.




Debating Divorce in Italy


Book Description

The popular referendum of 1974 which affirmed Italy's recently-won divorce law is widely regarded as a turning point in modern Italian history, but the long story behind that struggle has remained largely unfamiliar. Using the debates over divorce as a lens, this book is a study of the quest to modernize Italy, Italians, and Italian marriage.




Law, Family, and Women


Book Description

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance, especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.




Modern Italy


Book Description

This Very Short Introduction considers the history of Italy from the Risorgimento (the movement leading to Italian Unification in 1861) to the present. It also discusses Italy's political system and style of government; economic modernisation; emigration, internal migration and immigration; and the modern Italian culture and lifestyle.




Italian Constitutional Justice in Global Context


Book Description

Italian Constitutional Justice in Global Context is the first book ever published in English to provide an international examination of the Italian Constitutional Court (ItCC), offering a comprehensive analysis of its principal lines of jurisprudence, historical origins, organization, procedures, and its current engagement with transnational European law. The ItCC represents one of the strongest and most successful examples of constitutional judicial review, and is distinctive in its structure, institutional dimensions, and well-developed jurisprudence. Moreover, the ItCC has developed a distinctive voice among global constitutional actors in its adjudication of a broad range of topics from fundamental rights and liberties to the allocations of governmental power and regionalism. Nevertheless, in global constitutional dialog, the voice of the ItCC has been almost entirely absent due to a relative lack of both English translations of its decisions and of focused scholarly commentary in English. This book describes the "Italian Style" in global constitutional adjudication, and aims to elevate Italian constitutional jurisprudence to an active participant role in global constitutional discourse. The authors have carefully structured the work to allow the ItCC's own voice to emerge. It presents broad syntheses of major areas of the Court's case law, provides excerpts from notable decisions in a narrative and analytical context, addresses the tension between the ItCC and the Court of Cassation, and positions the development, character, and importance of the ItCC's jurisprudence in the larger arc of global judicial dialog.