Law and Politics

Those who believe they possess the truth are exposed to dogmatism. Those who claim representation of a supposed 'natural law' only prepare for new conflicts. In our pluralistic societies 'just' conceptions of life coexist in constant confrontation: this is their richness.

Absolute justice and the 'meekness' of law, the value of the Constitution and power as command, the culture of rules and that of imposed 'truth,' diversity and coexistence: the answers of a leading figure in Italian legal culture.

What is left of democracy if there are very powerful, very remote, increasingly decisive oligarchies at work? "Today we live in a time when democracy – as a principle, as an idea, as a legitimizing force for power –is out of the question. Therefore, if oligarchy is established in our regimes, it must do so in democratic forms; it must somehow disguise itself; it cannot openly present itself as a usurpation of power. Thus, the question arises of its identification behind appearances and the need to bring its substance into focus.”

The idea of justice arises from the experience of injustice, suffered by us or those dear to us. For a common discourse we can start from here, not from abstract speculations that, instead of uniting, have always divided.

Do human rights depend on the law, and what is the relationship between the law and the demands of justice?

Are we still living in a democracy, or are we immersed in a post-democratic system whose meaning and true aims we don’t understand? Can we speak today of the sovereignty of the democratic state, or is it the oligarchies, multinationals and centres of financial power that govern the democracies? How can a state that is deeply in debt, as many European states are today, describe itself as free and truly democratic? What has democracy become today?

What is law, who do jurists think they are and what are they believed to be, what do they actually do when they write judgments, citations, briefs, opinions, books, or expound legal ideas to a class of students? Answers are many, but none eliminates doubts and all open possibilities for thinking, doing or saying differently. Each lends itself to being turned one way or the other. We don't know if the same thing can be said for every profession. But for those who work with law, certainly yes.

A collection of reflections and contributions on different issues and authors: the history of death, the First of May festivity, forms and victims of intolerance, the Manzonian "plague." They are minor fruits of a vocation for the study of history that animated the generation of those born under Fascism and raised after World War II, driven to the study of history by a desire for redemption and social justice learned from the protagonists of resistance to fascism such as Antonio Gramsci and Marc Bloch.

According to Zagrebelsky, law has a dual soul: legal judgment always incorporates evaluations of material justice and thus does not exhaust itself in the application of legislative formulas. Those evaluations are not prejudices or influences to be avoided, but essential components of what is to be understood by law, and as such must be cultivated openly, restoring the authentic dualist structure of law. This dualism is reflected par excellence in the judicial use of the Constitution, where the material justice component of law is evident.

Whatever happened to political allegiances? Some say the fading of friction between antithetical group identities is a sign that politics has moved on from ideological infatuation into a new pragmatic dimension. But the reasons for the Right-Left clash are all still there on the ‘global’ carpet, indeed they are magnified by the unifying of the world. The most surprising thing is that the softening of the Left is happening just when the scandal of inequality is breaking.