Bologna’s Legal Realism

Introduction

As elsewhere, so in Italy it was in the late 1960s that legal positivism fell into crisis – having first developed in a substantially uniform way in the 1950s and 1960s through the intersection of analytic philosophy and Kelsen’s pure theory – and it is out of that crisis that legal realism emerged.

It was not so much the American brand of realism as the Scandinavian variety that provided the input for the original conceptions developed in Italy. Two main realist schools took shape, especially through the work of Silvana Castignone and Riccardo Guastini, of the University of Genoa, and Enrico Pattaro, of the University of Bologna.

This activity once prompted Jerzy Wróblewski to say, “Scandinavian legal realism is no longer cultivated in Scandinavian countries but is now being cultivated in Italy,” particularly by Enrico Pattaro.

Main Text

It was early on that Pattaro (b. 1941) began to take an interest in Scandinavian legal realism, starting from his dissertation – written...