My first legal education came from my father, the legal philosopher Alessandro Giuliani (1925-1997), and an atmosphere shaped by deep respect for legal scholarship. Family life resonated with his insightful (and in legal scholarship still influential) logocentric vision of the law which he grounded in the ‘other Aristotle‘ – not the author of the Organon, but of the Rhetoric, the Politics and the Ethics. Growing up at home meant being drawn into thrilling conversations about the natura rerum, the kairos, the verum ipsum factum and other ideas I have only come to understand in full with time. What I really know of the law begins there.
Then there were the dinner conversations with his colleagues and friends. I vividly remember his lifelong friends Michel Villey and Peter Stein, as well as other intellectually charismatic scholars who were among the finest legal minds of their generation.
Almost naturally I went on to study law at university, utterly fascinated by the subject and determined to excel. At the end of my studies I had mastered the subjects, but felt it inappropriate to follow the family path: it seemed too easy and troubled my sense of integrity. Having trained formally in violin, I turned to a musical career as a player and teacher. To my mind law seemed enclosed in words: in music I sought a rationality without language.
A competitive British Council Grant for the Arts brought me to London. I studied violin with a world-class teacher and Analysis of Music at King’s College. I went on to develop an educational project for pupils without musical background, grounded both in historical texts (Leopold Mozart’s Treatise, 1756) and in recent research in physiology. The results were disseminated through a journal published under the patronage of Lord Yehudi Menuhin, promoting an approach that has since become broadly accepted. In retrospect, my musical experience taught me three essential lessons for legal scholarship: to think in systems, fidelity to texts and an overarching sense of time.
When a hand injury ended my career in 1997, I resolved to enter academia. My father had died that same year, and I wanted to recapture what I had learned at home and make it usable again. With a letter of presentation from Lord Menuhin I was accepted at the London School of Economics, where I undertook a postgraduate course supervised by the British philosopher John Gray. I then moved to Cambridge, initially with Quentin Skinner, and gradually retraced an intellectual line that led to an extensive doctoral research on sixteenth-century theories of presumptions (PhD Cambridge 2007). During that time, Peter Stein, my father’s old friend, would periodically invite me over to discuss my work. I always left those meetings with the feeling that someone was missing from the room.
Looking back, I realise I did not enter historical studies with a clear-cut programme but I entered it rather with broad philosophical questions that took years to fully shape. Alessandro Giuliani’s legacy spans an unusual range of disciplines: procedure, constitutional law, private law, economics, sociology (link) — fields he held together under an overarching juristic vision. Tracing that vision became a research in the full sense: a journey that left me with an interdisciplinary sense of adventure and a certain boldness in crossing boundaries.
None of the above would have been possible without the presence of Caterina and the joy brought by our son Rubén (b. 2002), now freshman at Yale University.
