November 2024

I’m working on an essay on the idea of time.
In his painting above, Caravaggio shows the passage of time in the insect-eaten apples and dried leaves. Law, too, is affected by the passage of time. Any legal object (rules, institutions, concepts) is touched by time, and it is the function of historiography to represent it in its temporal quality.
But such operations imply a question: how is the present related to the past; and how is the present the result of change?
My essay explains that the answer has changed: the nineteenth century saw the present guided by timeless models located in the past; the twentieth century rejected this legacy and tended to see the present fused with the past in a ‘pastness‘ that legal historians placed at the centre of their accounts of legal traditions. And today we are confronted with the challenge of a broad present that blurs the boundaries of separate temporal stages.

Background

Academically trained as a legal and intellectual historian at the University of Cambridge (PhD 2007 and MPhil 2001) and at the London School of Economics (MSc 2000), I have a background in law (Italian laurea cum laude, 1998) and also received a second PhD in EU private law (Macerata 2014).

A former research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt aM, Germany (2020-22), at the University of Helsinki, Finland (2017-19) and at the University of Rome (2016-17), I’m currently serving the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research.

Awards: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), British Council Grant for the Arts.

Research focus

I have a combined interest in legal history and legal theory.

In legal history my research focuses on late-medieval and early-modern European continental law with particular reference to judicial reasoning, and have written on presumption, interpretation, judicial discretion, multinormativity and others. Such inquiries converge on a broad research on the cognitive dimension of presumption in the 16th century.

In legal theory I am particularly interested in the 20th century philosophy that made judge-made law relevant again, from the Freirechtsschule to the various versions of anti-formalism of the period 1930-60. Such inquiries converge on a broad research on the relationship between legal history and legal theory.

In my most recent research I seek to explain how legal history interacts with the broader context of legal science, showing how this discipline is dependent from changing theoretical frameworks. This research, partly published (see here), is the kernel of a new monograph (tentatively) entitled “Changing images of the legal past.”

Another stream of research (InfoLaw) examines how the information age is changing our ways of thinking about the legal past.

Background

Influences: antiformalism, Alessandro Giuliani, Michel Villey, Peter Stein, Chaïm Perelman, John Gray, Emanuel Hurwitz.