ARTICLES: Historia et Ius 2023 [OPEN ACCESS]

 

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Les dictionnaires juridiques français du XIXe siècle à destination des profanes. Anatomie d’un genre littéraire (Laetitia Guerlain) (DOI 10.32064/23.2023.11)

Abstract:

 This article studies the attempt to popularize the law in the French 19th century, taking as a case study the fifteen or so legal dictionaries published for lay people between 1806 and 1909. A whole sector of the editorial production was indeed intended for non-lawyers, eager to learn about the law or to understand their rights (workers, women, merchants, etc.). The articleproposes an anatomy of this original literary genre, by studying both its form and its content. In doing so, it reveals a part of legal literature that was previously little known, even though it testifies to the political and social stakes of the democratization of law and, conse- quently, to the lack of neutrality of legal writing.

Capograssi, imperdonabile (Andrew J. Cecchinato) (DOI 10.32064/23/2023.09)

Abstract:

When reviewing the history of early twentieth century thought, it is not uncommon to read reflections concerning the crisis of contemporary states. Less frequent – but not unheard of – is coming across meditations regarding the very end of the state. Among the latter, those of Giuseppe Capograssi (1889-1956) stand out like a lightning flash, for the eschatological meaning they flare upon the rela- tionship between statehood and the law. «All true research on the state is a pro- found meditation on its ending», he writes concluding the introduction of his first book in 1918. Like a seal yet to be broken, the claim envelops Capograssi's thought and invites readers to unravel the riddle of his jurisprudence. The article breaks that seal to show how – reflecting on the state’s ending – Capograssi understood religion to be the fulfilment of legal experience.

L’unificazione del diritto penale militare nel Regno d’Italia fra tentativi di  adeguamento legislativo e «nuovi» codici (1869). Un profilo storico-giuridico (Ferruccio Maradei) (DOI 10.32064/23.2023.08)

Abstract:

This essay focuses on the problem of the unification of military crimi- nal law in the first decade following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. It aims at an historical reconstruction of the various interventions regarding the mil- itary criminal codes, concerning respectively the «Regio Esercito» and the «Regia Marina». In this period it was, in particular, the «Codice penale militare marittimo», is- sued in 1869 after a troubled parliamentary process, to achieve the overcoming of the «old» 1826 Editto penale militare marittimo (extended to the Kingdom of Italy in the first years after the Unification), and inspired by two different models: the ne- apolitan Statuti penali militari per l’armata di mare (1819) and the French Code de justice maritime (1858). The enactment of these military penal codes, which took place in 1869 in the Kingdom of Italy, however, did not lead to the unification of legal discipline for the two branches of the italian armed forces nor to the full adapta- tion, mostly desired by doctrine, with the general criminal law.

The tyranny of the Organism. Criminal liability between anthropology, morality and neuroscience (Pietro Schirò) (DOI 10.32064/23.2023.07)

Abstract:

This text focuses on the theme of criminal responsibility in Italian legal science at the end of the 19th century, when the development of new sciences such as comparative medicine, anthropology and sociology, favoured by the rise of positivism and Darwinism, radically changed the concept of criminal liability. In the following pages, I discuss the denial of free will in favour of the determinist theses expressed first by Cesare Lombroso and his criminal anthropol- ogy, and then by a series of jurists who prefer to hold that crime is generated by social factors, and that this being the case, the moral order of a society must be taken into account, which is the only way to maintain the notion of guilt in the penal system. In the end, a final mention is made of the impact of neuroscience, which once again seems to compress the freedom of the human will.

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