My field of knowledge is Legal
History. In fact, I lecture Legal History at the School of Law.
Should I be able to imagine
how you, dear classmates, consider such a thing as Legal History, I could
explain in a most effective way a number of relevant issues in order to help
you to understand the essence of this science. To tell the truth, I am not very
optimistic about the prevailing opinion on the matter, and I have the tendency
to believe that normal, intelligent people like you suspect that studying Legal
History is not the most exciting way to spend someone’s life.
Legal History sounds like
something perhaps vaguely interesting, but of course boring, something which
has to do with old libraries crammed with huge, dusty volumes written in Latin,
volumes whose contents would remain obscure even though they were translated
into modern languages, full as they are of rare words, tricky arguments typical
of lawyers and intricate statutes or laws.
It doesn’t look stunningly
attractive, not only to normal, intelligent people like you, but also to Historians
and Jurists. As a matter of fact, we legal historians feel entirely alone in a
sort of no one’s land which is midway between liberal arts and social sciences.
We are widely considered by Historians not to be colleagues, and therefore they
hardly ever read what we write. As for the Lawyers, they keep so extremely busy
with the course of current legislation that they have no time to take a quick
glimpse into the past; they don’t read our books and papers either.
In a certain way, they
Historians and Lawyers are right. Because if someone is interested in the past,
he studies History, and if he is interested in Law, he studies in the School of
Law in order to become Lawyer or Judge. Could you imagine a stranger thing than
a teenager making up his mind to be a Legal Historian? Of that kind of monster
there’s no evidence whatsoever. How, then, is possible the mere existence of
Legal Historians? Well, I am deeply convinced of this: we are people lost in
the pursuit of a profession.
I myself arrived by chance at
Legal History. As a young student wondering about my professional future, a
sunny morning of June, many years ago, I went to my father to initiate a
serious conversation about the matter. I said I loved History, but he advised
me not to invest five years of my life in such an unproductive task as studying
History. It was he who successfully persuaded me to try to get a degree in Law in
order to become a notary or something similar.
And here I am as a Legal
Historian. I am sure that my father didn’t expect this effect as the direct
result of his piece of advice. But now I feel it was a good one, because I can
develop my love of History, and I am also convinced that it is worth devoting
one’s life (its professional dimension) to Legal History.
I will tell you why. Legal
History is a linchpin of a jurist education. Every year, at the beginning or
the first semester, I ask my students where lies the real cause of the presence
of such a subject in our curriculum. They usually answer that in order to
understand the Law currently in force we need to know the Law of the past, as
though our contemporary Laws and statutes were determined by the ancient ones.
It is not difficult to make them understand that they are mistaken: they become
quickly aware of the fact that our current Law is the result of the will of the
Nation as expressed in the Parliament by its representatives, whose declaration
will come into force even if it makes a complete break with the past.
And that’s precisely the
point. Our current Law is the result of our current convictions. Law is
something historically determined, in such a way that every society has a
different system of Laws which fits the circumstances of culture, time and place. A
complete understanding of this statement provides the jurist with an essential
critical view about Law, indispensable in order to develop his professional
tasks.
