Obiettivi formativi
Theoretical foundations of global law: The course provides the core categories of legal theory and jurisprudence - validity, normativity, authority, sovereignty, justice, and interpretation - within a world in which domestic, international, transnational, religious, indigenous, and technological normative orders overlap and compete.
Universalization and localization: Its central objective is to understand the clash between theories that present law as capable of transcending borders and affiliations and theories that locate law in a territory, a political community, a tradition, or a concrete distribution of power. Cases, historical trials, and different legal systems will be used to test the potential and limits of both perspectives.
Individual critical judgment for the global lawyer: Above all, the course seeks to cultivate the intellectual autonomy required of lawyers operating in the global legal system. Students will be expected not to reproduce dominant categories or solutions passively, but to identify their assumptions, interests, omissions, and possible biases; distinguish legality, legitimacy, effectiveness, and justice; compare incompatible arguments; and develop a rigorous, responsible position of their own when confronting cultural plurality, competing authorities, and problems for which no single final decision-maker exists.
Prerequisiti
Prerequisites: None. No prior knowledge of jurisprudence is required. Students are expected to engage in critical reading, reasoned discussion, and respectful comparison among different legal and cultural perspectives.
Risultati di apprendimento attesi
Knowledge and understanding: By the end of the course, students will know the principal natural-law, positivist, realist, constitutional, international-law, justice, and interpretive theories. They will also understand different conceptions of normativity in civil-law and common-law systems, Islamic and Chinese legal thought, and the challenges posed by human rights, warfare, and artificial intelligence.
Applying knowledge and understanding: Students will be able to use theoretical categories to analyze hard cases, historical trials, and conflicts among legal orders; distinguish descriptive from normative claims; reconstruct the reasons supporting alternative decisions; and assess whether a global legal claim can be justified and implemented across different local contexts.
Making judgments: Students will develop the independent critical judgment required of a global lawyer. They will be able to question apparently universal categories, identify the standpoint from which they are formulated, compare competing authorities and traditions, and take a reasoned position of their own without retreating behind the authority of a text, the lecturer, or majority opinion.
Communication skills: Students will present legal-theoretical arguments clearly, concisely, and persuasively in speech and writing; address objections; use the vocabulary of jurisprudence accurately; and communicate with interlocutors trained in different legal traditions.
Learning skills: Students will independently read theoretical works, legal sources, and cases; connect arguments from different systems; select reliable materials; and pursue further study of global legal problems with method, intellectual curiosity, and critical independence.
Contenuti Del Corso
I. Law, morality, and globality: The source of normativity between natural law and legal positivism; Antigone, the Speluncean Explorers, Nuremberg, and the Nazi Informer Case.
II. Plural legal worlds: Civil law and common law; Islamic and Chinese legal theory; the translatability and limits of Western legal categories.
III. Rights between the universal and the particular: The positivization of natural law; human rights, cultural difference, self-determination, and Sentinel Island.
IV. Law and power: Authority, sovereignty, the State, social-contract theory, constitutions, and constituent power; Kelsen and Schmitt; Weimar; the trials of Louis XVI and Socrates.
V. Space, international order, and war: The U.S. conquest and Native Nations; the movement from inter-state to international law; nomos, universalism, the law of war, and lawfare.
VI. Justice, adjudication, and interpretation: Rawls and his critics; adjudication, American Legal Realism, and Critical Legal Studies; punishment; Eichmann; Scandinavian Realism, hermeneutics, and originalism.
VII. The limits of law: Artificial intelligence, rhetoric, and legal calculability; the capacity and incapacity of legal categories to govern emerging global phenomena.
Testi Di Riferimento
Compulsory materials for all students: All materials uploaded by the Professor to MyLuiss; 1. Plato, Apology of Socrates and Crito; 2. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace; 3. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea; 4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Optional for attending students, but compulsory for justified non-attending students: 1. Raymond Wacks, Understanding Jurisprudence: An Introduction to Legal Theory (limited to the chapters and sections relevant to the topics listed in the syllabus); 2. Benjamin A. Schupmann, Carl Schmitt's State and Constitutional Theory (Chapters 1, 4, and 5).
Optional fiction for all students: One novel chosen from: 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading; 2. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon; 3. William Golding, Lord of the Flies; 4. Leslie P. Hartley, Facial Justice. Literary reading is proposed as an independent exercise on the relationship among rules, power, responsibility, conformity, and individual judgment.
Metodologie Didattiche
Acquisition: Interactive lectures, guided readings, slides, podcasts, and online quizzes for acquiring the core categories and vocabulary.
Application: Analysis of hard cases and historical trials, decision-making simulations, and short exercises in which the same dispute is approached through different theories or legal orders.
Investigation: Comparative reading of theoretical texts, legal sources, and materials from different traditions, with attention to the author's standpoint, implicit assumptions, and the local or global scale of each argument.
Discussion: Socratic debates, seminars, and small-group discussions. Participation does not reward conformity with the lecturer's position; it rewards each student's ability to formulate a thesis, support it with reasons, address objections, and revise it where necessary.
Production: Short oral and written interventions, critical commentaries, and personal arguments. Collaboration broadens perspectives; each student remains responsible for an individual judgment.
Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento
Attending students - 65% mid-term: The optional written mid-term covers all topics taught up to the test. It comprises 60 multiple-choice questions: 0.5 points for each correct answer and 0 points for each incorrect or unanswered question, up to 30 points. It also includes two open-ended answers, each limited to 7 lines, on the Apology of Socrates and Crito, worth up to 5 additional points in total. The maximum raw score of 35 is normalized for the mid-term's 65% weighting in the final grade.
Attending students - 10% active participation: Assessment considers the continuity and quality of questions, objections, and comments, the ability to connect theories and cases, and above all critical independence. Participation does not require agreement with the lecturer or the majority.
Attending students - 25% final oral examination: The oral examination covers the topics taught after the mid-term and the books by Kant, Schmitt, and Arendt. It assesses knowledge, conceptual precision, comparative ability, and the quality of the student's own argument.
Optional character and rejection of the mid-term grade: Students who do not take the mid-term or reject its grade will also be examined orally on the written-test topics; that assessment will replace the mid-term component.
Justified non-attending students: The entire syllabus will be examined in the final oral examination. In addition to the materials compulsory for all students, the relevant parts of Wacks and Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of Schupmann are compulsory.
Criteri per l’assegnazione dell’elaborato finale
Criteria: Assignment of a final thesis will particularly value a strong interest in legal theory, the ability to formulate a genuinely theoretical research question relevant to the global dimension, willingness to compare different traditions or normative levels, and above all critical independence and intellectual engagement. The proposal must be feasible in light of the available sources and supported by a commitment to regular work.
Settimana 1
Week I - Introduction to the course: Presentation of content, method, materials, and assessment. The opening question is whether law in the global system can be universal or necessarily remains located in a space, an authority, and a community.
a) Mare Liberum/Mare Clausum and theories of Global Law: The Grotius-Selden dispute is treated as an archetype of the tension between universal openness and sovereign appropriation. Introduction to legal globalization, transnational law, pluralism, and norm-making beyond the State.
b) Antigone and the classical natural lawyers: The tragedy frames the conflict between enacted law and unwritten justice. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas provide the basis for asking whether standards of validity or justice exist before and above positive law.
c) Classical legal positivists: From Hume to Bentham and Austin: the is/ought distinction, command, sanction, and sovereignty. Savigny's Historical School introduces an early and powerful localist objection to the universalization of law.
Materials: Materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 2
Week II - Natural law and legal positivism: The opening dichotomy becomes a laboratory of decision and responsibility, testing what happens when formal validity, substantive justice, and necessity collide.
a) The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Fuller's fictional opinions allow students to compare textualism, purposivism, natural law, positivism, and realism in deciding the same hard case. Each student will be required to formulate and defend an individual judgment.
b) Hart and Raz: Primary and secondary rules, the internal point of view, the rule of recognition, discretion, and exclusive positivism. The class will ask whether legal authority can be explained without reference to the moral correctness of law.
c) The Nuremberg Trials: Legality, retroactivity, individual responsibility, and international crimes: Nuremberg tests both State-centered positivism and the universalist claim that justice may stand above local legal orders.
Materials: Materials and case uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 3
Week III - Normativity in different legal systems: The week challenges the assumption that a single Western theory can describe every legal experience. Comparison will concern sources, authority, reasoning, and concepts of binding force.
a) Civil law and common law: Code and precedent, the judicial role, legal professions, and argumentative styles. Both traditions will be treated as historically mobile and internally plural families rather than closed models.
b) Islamic legal theory: Shari'a, fiqh, and usul al-fiqh; sources, schools, and interpretive techniques; changing relations among religious normativity, political institutions, and contemporary State law.
c) Chinese legal theory: Confucian and Legalist traditions, the relationship between li and fa, political order, and transformations of modern law. The lesson tests the translatability of rule of law, subjective rights, and authority.
Materials: Comparative materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 4
Week IV - Human rights: Human rights provide the clearest test of the conflict between universalism and localization: they claim validity for every person but depend on situated texts, institutions, and practices.
a) The positivization of natural law: From revolutionary declarations to constitutions and international treaties: the transformation of universal moral claims into positive norms, with attention to implementation and selectivity.
b) Modern natural lawyers and the Hart-Fuller debate: Finnis and Fuller; the internal morality of law and basic goods. The Nazi Informer Case reopens the validity of radically unjust laws and the limits of fidelity to law.
c) Sentinel Island: The case is used to discuss protection of life, self-determination, isolation, sovereignty, cultural difference, and non-interference. Students must judge how far a universal claim of protection may legitimately reach.
Materials: Materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 5
Week V - Law and power: Legal theory is connected to the political conditions that make the production, application, and enforcement of norms possible. Authority will be studied both as a justification and as a concrete relation of power.
a) Authority, sovereignty, the State, and social-contract theories: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau: the state of nature, consent, representation, political obligation, and the monopoly of decision. The class will ask whether sovereignty remains the necessary grammar of global law.
b) Theories of constitution: Formal and material constitution, constitutionalism, constituent power, representation, and constitutional adjudication. A constitution appears at once as a limit on power and the historical form of a political community.
c) The trial of Louis XVI: The revolutionary trial stages the passage between two legal orders and the paradox of judging the sovereign through an authority born from his deposition.
Materials: Materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks and Schupmann.
Settimana 6
Week VI - Law and power: The second week on power contrasts normativism and decisionism, constitutional transformation, and individual obedience. The critical issue is when a legal order retains its identity and authority.
a) Kelsen and Schmitt on norms and the State; Weimar: Normative purity, the identity of State and legal order, sovereignty, decision, and exception. Weimar's collapse tests the ability of both theories to explain constitutional crisis and change.
b) Generations of rights and constitution: Civil, political, and social rights and newer collective claims; rigidity, amendment, and evolutionary interpretation. The class will ask whether constitutions can open themselves to global rights without losing democratic rootedness.
c) The trial of Socrates: Apology of Socrates and Crito: conscience, persuasion, obedience, belonging, and criticism of the city. The case requires each person to determine whether and why an allegedly unjust decision should be obeyed.
Materials: Plato, Apology of Socrates and Crito; materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant chapters of Wacks and Schupmann.
Settimana 7
Week VII - Mid-term: Mid-term test on the topics covered in Weeks I-VI and on Plato's works. The test assesses not only knowledge of the theories but also the ability to distinguish competing claims and apply them critically to cases. Its structure, weight, optional character, and the right to reject the grade are specified in the Assessment Method section.
Materials: All compulsory materials relating to the first part of the course.
Settimana 8
Week VIII - From Inter-national Law to International Law: The week examines how world legal space has been constructed through expansion, classification, and conflict. It compares the universalism of international order with theories that expose its historical and geopolitical location.
a) U.S. conquest and Native Nations: Conquest, treaties, the doctrine of discovery, plural sovereignty, and the legal classification of Native Nations. The case shows how ostensibly universal categories can locate, include, or erase other legal orders.
b) International legal theory in Kelsen and Schmitt: Monism, the primacy of international law, and peace through law; nomos, large spaces, and the critique of universalism. Students will compare two opposing conceptual maps of world order.
c) The law of war in Kelsen and Schmitt: Jus ad bellum, jus in bello, just war, the criminalization of the enemy, and the transformation of warfare. The question is whether law can constrain force without reproducing the spatial order of the victors.
Materials: Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace; Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea; materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant chapters of Wacks and Schupmann.
Settimana 9
Week IX - Justice: The course moves from the existence and authority of law to standards for judging its content and consequences. War and distribution reveal how strongly a theory of justice depends on the local, domestic, or global scale at which it operates.
a) War has changed: lawfare: Asymmetric and hybrid warfare, technology, non-State actors, and the strategic use of rules, courts, and legal arguments. Law will be examined simultaneously as constraint, language of legitimation, and instrument of conflict.
b) Justice in Rawls: The original position, the veil of ignorance, equal liberties, and the difference principle; the extension and limits of the theory beyond domestic society and in relation to the law of peoples.
c) Critics of Rawls: Nozick, Hayek, and Sandel: libertarian and communitarian critiques, desert, markets, belonging, and neutrality. The discussion will extend to global distributive justice.
Materials: materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 10
Week X - Justice: Justice is examined at the concrete moment of decision and punishment. The common question is how judges, punitive institutions, and individual agents may judge others without evading responsibility for their own judgment.
a) Making justice and theories of adjudication: Formalism, discretion, and the judicial role; American Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies. Discussion will address indeterminacy, extra-legal factors, social hierarchies, and the global circulation of adjudicative models.
b) Theories of punishment: Retribution, deterrence, prevention, rehabilitation, and restorative justice. Theories will be compared in relation to dignity, effectiveness, community, and the plurality of punitive cultures.
c) Eichmann in Jerusalem: Legality, obedience, personal responsibility, judgment, and crimes exceeding the State framework. Arendt restores the exercise of individual critical thought to the center of legal responsibility in the face of rules and bureaucratic systems.
Materials: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 11
Week XI - Legal interpretation: Interpretation connects a text produced in one place and time to a new case. The week examines how far interpretation depends on social facts, tradition, intention, purpose, and the decision-maker's choice.
a) Scandinavian Realists: Hägerström, Olivecrona, and Ross: critique of legal metaphysics, validity as social fact, normative language, and institutional behavior. Realism tests the claimed objectivity of legal categories.
b) Theories of interpretation and hermeneutics: Literalism, intentionalism, purposivism, and constructive interpretation; pre-understanding, the hermeneutic circle, and tradition. Application to texts expected to operate across different legal orders and cultures.
c) Originalism: Original meaning, intention, precedent, and democracy; Scalia and his critics. The class will ask whether a theory rooted in U.S. constitutional history can be exported and with what consequences.
Materials: Materials uploaded to MyLuiss; for justified non-attending students, the relevant sections of Wacks.
Settimana 12
Week XII - The Edge: The concluding week takes the course's categories to the edge of their explanatory capacity. Students must formulate an autonomous position on what global law can govern, who may legitimately decide, and what resists legal ordering.
a) Artificial intelligence and law: Automated decisions, predictive systems, global infrastructures, and private norm-making. AI exposes the contrast between the planetary circulation of technology and the local plurality of values, authorities, and rules.
b) Rhetoric and legal calculability: From the aspiration to formalize reasoning to legal analytics: rules, arguments, probability, and decision. The class will assess what can be calculated and what part of judgment still requires interpretation, responsibility, and persuasion.
c) Law and limit: Exception, unregulated spaces, normative plurality, and the internal and external limits of law. Final synthesis of the clash between universalization and localization and discussion of the global lawyer's personal responsibility.
Materials: Materials uploaded to MyLuiss and a cross-cutting review of the four compulsory books.