Past, pastness and the broad present: changing images of time in legal history
“How does the past relate to the present, how does being connect to becoming?” This question has remained at the core of legal history since its emergence as an academic discipline in the 19th century, yet it has provoked three successive responses, which this paper categorises as past, pastness, and broad-present.
in eds. S. Zorzetto, P. di Lucia, P. Heritier, and P. Silvestri, Law and Spatio-Temporal Dimensions: Investigating the Boundaries of Normativity, Springer (2026) (forthcoming)
Knowing Through Maxims
What is the relation between the general fact summarised by the maxim and the puzzling specific fact to be determined, What is the relation between the Universal Mother of the maxim “mothers love their children” used by King Solomon in his iconic judgement and the singular presumed mother in front of his eyes?
Regulae Iuris in Legal Historical Perspective: Essential Stability vs. Evolving Contexts, I. Kotlyar (ed.), Brill Publ., 2025 • DOI https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004736092_001 [SSRN]
F. Calasso’s concept of ius commune, the Romanist tradition, and the problem of historical representation
Outline: I. 1933: rethinking the ius commune, II. The historical problem of the ius commune, III. The Romanist tradition, guardian of orthodoxy, IV. What Savigny could not see: the ius commune as explained in the year 1573, V. Calasso’s methodology and the problem of historical representation, V. Conclusion: Romanists vs. legal historians
Clio@Themis Revue https://doi.org/10.4000/12qyy (November 2024) [SSRN]
Chapter 1500-1650
The period 1500–1650 witnessed events that fundamentally transformed both the spiritual and material lives of individuals. Yet the texts and arguments employed in legal practice reveal a striking continuity with medieval patterns of thought that persisted well into the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter aims to account for that apparent contradiction. Methodologically, it represents a first, modest attempt to approach legal history through a broad survey of the legal process, structured around its three essential components: the creation of law, its actors, and its application.
A Companion to Western Legal Traditions eds. R. Van Rhee, A. Masferrer and S. Donlan (Brill 2024) ISBN: 978-90-04-68725-7
What is innovation in legal history? Gino Gorla and the rise of comparative legal history
A Companion to Western Legal Traditions eds. R. Van Rhee, A. Masferrer and S. Donlan (Brill 2024) ISBN: 978-90-04-68725-7
Rethinking Emilio Betti, the anti-Gadamer
Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History Rg 30 (2022) 289-91 http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg30/289-291 (book review)
After comparative legal history
E. Calzolaio (ed.), Liber amicorum Luigi Moccia (Rome 2021) DOI: 10.13134/979-12-5977-003-5
The Western Legal Tradition and Soviet Russia. The genesis of H. Berman’s Law and Revolution
The Western Legal Tradition (WLT) is a product of the Cold War. The concept was first developed by Harvard legal historian H.J. Berman in his 1950 book Justice in Russia, which defined the West against Soviet Russia by contrast — each side embodying what the other lacked. Another legacy of that period was human rights. This theme was absorbed into the WLT by hijacking a core concept of continental legal science — subjektives Recht — which political theorists repackaged as the defining feature of a Western identity rooted in an ideal continuity with medieval canon law.
in V. Erkkilä and H.-P. Haferkamp (eds.), The Socialist Interpretations of Legal History. The Histories and Historians of Law and Justice in the Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe (Routledge) [2020] https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000C-F6AA-F
What is comparative legal history? Legal historiography and the revolt against formalism, 1930-60
What is comparative legal history? To answer that, we first need to understand how legal historiography itself has changed. Two ideas are central here.
The first is that legal history writing is always shaped by an underlying image of law — what law is, how it is made, and by whom. This image defines the very object of historical inquiry. The second is that the decades between 1930 and 1960 marked a turning point in European legal science, as a generation of scholars turned against the formalism inherited from the nineteenth century.
That antiformalist revolt gave rise to a wave of works explicitly framed as comparative legal history. At their core were ideas that still drive original legal-historical research today — situating law in context, thinking beyond doctrine, resisting abstract theorising — insights so widely shared they now pass for common sense. They are, in fact, the fruit of that mid-twentieth-century turn.
in Comparative Legal History, A. Masferrer and O. Morétau (eds.) (Research Handbooks in Comparative Law series, E. Elgar Publishing, London, 2019), pp. 30-77.
Bartolo senza Bartolismo
In Conversazioni Bartoliane, ed. F. Treggiari (2018), pp. 59-86.
Jurisdictional complexity in the Ecclesiastical State. A discussion on the diversity of laws in legal education and legal practice
in D. Heirbaut and S. Donlan (eds.), The Laws’ Many Bodies: Studies in Legal Hybridity and Jurisdictional Complexity, c1600-1900 (Duncker und Humblot, Berlin, 2015)
Civilian treatises on presumptions, 1580-1620
A wave of treatises on presumptions appeared at the turn of the 17th century. This essay argues that they were more than practical tools for the working jurist. They carried a new vision of judicial procedure, one that gave rise to three fundamental principles:
(i) the separation of law and fact
(ii) the subjection of the judge to principles of reasoning
(iii) the centrality of will as an autonomous source of contractual obligation
The essay traces the contribution of these treatises to the genesis of each.
in R. Helmholz, The Law of Presumptions: Essays in Comparative Legal History (Comparative Studies in Continental & Anglo-American Legal History, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2009), pp. 21-71
Una nota sul bartolismo
in F. Treggiari (ed.) Atti del Convegno su Bartolo da Sassoferrato (2014), pp. 585-600.
From presumption to interpretation
This essay traces a shift in the meaning of “interpretation” in the late 16th century legal lexicon: from the derivation of norms from other norms, to the recovery of the will of the norm’s author. The argument proceeds from a reading of Jacopo Menochio’s De praesumptionibus (1587).
in F. Treggiari (ed.), Per Saturam. Studi per Severino Caprioli (2008), pp. 447-74.
Tre giuristi perugini cinquecenteschi: Giovan Paolo Lancellotti, Paolo Comitoli, Benincasio Benincasa
in F. Treggiari (ed.), Giuristi dell’Università di Perugia, (2009), pp. 217-39.
Aprire le porte del diritto. Il lascito intellettuale di Alessandro Giuliani (1925-1997)
in: Quaderni per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno, 95 (2012), pp. 165-184
L’altro Aristotele
in Sociologia, 3 (2010), pp. 125-33
Jacopo Menochio, De praesumptionibus, 1587
in: A. Wijffels, S. Dauchy et al. (eds.), The Formation and Transmission of Western Legal Culture. 150 Books that Made the Law in the Age of Printing (Springer, Berlin, 2016), pp. 132-6.
D. Covarrubias y Leyva, Variarum Resolutionum ex jure pontificio regio et caesareo, 1552
in: A. Wijffels, S. Dauchy et al. (eds.), The Formation and Transmission of Western Legal Culture. 150 Books that Made the Law in the Age of Printing (Springer, Berlin, 2016), pp. 88-91.
‘Rinaldo Ridolfi’, ‘Marcantonio Eugeni’, ‘Guglielmo Pontano’
in E. Cortese, I. Birocchi et al. (eds.), Dizionario Biografico dei Giuristi Italiani (2013)
Review of A. Fiori, Il giuramento di innocenza nel processo canonico medievale. Storia e disciplina della purgatio canonica
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 100 (2014), pp. 690-693 (book review)
English translation (with Caterina Fitzgerald) of A. Padoa Schioppa, A History of Law in Europe, for Cambridge University Press (2017, 820 pp.)
ISBN:9781316848227 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316848227