The workshop will be a hybrid event held in-person (Room 320D) and via Zoom. As a reminder, we ask that you RSVP for each workshop in advance so that we can circulate the paper, provide the Zoom link to the event, and for food ordering purposes for those of you who wish to join us in-person. Please read the paper in advance.

Current guidelines do not allow us to bring food into events. For those who attend in-person, however, lunch will be provided at 12:25PM, 20 minutes before the talk at a table in Crocker Garden to the left of Room 190 entry doors.

We also ask all those who attend in-person to comply with current Stanford event guidelines which can be found here.

To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event.

Abstract:

Three lectures delivered in three different languages in 1909 offer the starting point of this journey though European legal historiography and the connections between historical narratives about medieval Europe and Santi Romano’s legal doctrines of legal pluralism. Romano was manifestly influenced by the work of Otto von Gierke, a prominent historian of German law and an influential jurist who connected his historical narratives to his political vision. Romano did the same in his influential book, The Legal Order, first published in 1918, which has continued to be reprinted and translated until the present.

Santi Romano’s corporatist doctrines influenced in turn the historical reconstruction promoted by Francesco Calasso, although the two were on opposite political sides (Romano had embraced Fascism, while Calasso was an anti-fascist).

Calasso went on to draw his picture of a “common legal past” for Europe as a prototype of a working legal pluralism, in which learned law and legal practices cooperated to form a well-balanced pluralist system of autonomous communities.