HISTORY OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LAW
Academic year and teacher
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- Versione italiana
- Academic year
- 2022/2023
- Teacher
- MICHELE PIFFERI
- Credits
- 6
- Didactic period
- Secondo Semestre
- SSD
- IUS/19
Training objectives
- The main knowledge provided by the course are: (1) the importance of the critical-historical methodology in studying law; (2) the main characteristics of the law systems in modern and contemporary eras, between the XVI century and WWII; (3) legal pluralism in different times.
The abilities gained by students are: (1) a critical approach to legal sources; (2) awareness of the political dimension of law and of its cultural and social bases beyond the normativistic approach. Prerequisites
- Basic knowledge of Modern and Contemporary History, achieved through a history manual of secondary school.
Course programme
- Part I (20 hours): Law in modern times. The new ideology of power and law; the building of the nation state and its prerogatives; pluralism in the Ancien Regime; the central role of legal doctrine: the tehory of natural law; legal humanism and rationalism; the first attempts of codification and consolidation of legal sources in the XVIII century; the modern codification in France and Germany; the Italian civil code of 1865 and the code of 1942.
Part II, with 3 thematic focuses of 6 hours each: (1) the power to punish and its limits in the modern age: from corporal punishment to prison; historiographical interpretations of the prison's origin; liberal criminal law and social defence in the late Nineteenth century; (2) welfare state and social laws: the new active role of the state; the developments of the labour law between XIX and XX centuries; (3) the transformation of property: the theory of divided property in the late medieval time and the idea of modern property as personal right; property and new technologies in the XIX century; an idea of property based on solidarity.
Part III, 2 hours will be dedicated to the search of legal sources in the library or on-line.
Six hours will be dedicated to Q&A with students, at the beginning of the course, after the first block, at the end of the course. Didactic methods
- Lectures. During classes, sources of different periods will be presented and discussed. Occasionally students will be asked to comment some specific sources in light of the presentation of the subject provided before by the lecturer.
The Eiduco app will be used and all the slides presented will be available in Eiduco together with the recorded audio of the classes. Learning assessment procedures
- Oral exam, aiming to ascertain the comprehension and knowledge of the subjects analysed during the course, as well as the abilities gained by students in critically interpreting both legal sources.
Reference texts
- For those students who attend classes, the exam will be based on the subjects discussed during classes and on the texts and sources available on the website of the course.
For those students who have not attended classes, the program is as follows:
Maurizio Fioravanti (a cura di), Lo Stato moderno in Europa. Istituzioni e diritto (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2011)
