Giurisprudenza

Based on comparative approaches and case studies, this paper analyzes the system of letters of intent (LOIs), underlining their advantages and potentialities but also their controversial elements, and to make suggestions to improve the future of this legal instrument. In particular, it deals with the problem of defining a LOI as an enforceable and binding document. To this respect, the paper introduces a “three-tier test” composed of test on contract formation; test on “de facto contract”; and test on good faith. It demonstrates that a LOI can be considered enforceable as a contract if it satisfies at least one of these tests. In conclusion, I will demonstrates the importance of the adoption of the concept of good faith in all countries; the problem of transnational LOIs and the impossibility to solve it completely with the “choice-of-law” mechanism; and the introduction of specific provisions on LOIs in every civil code and the unification of contract law at a regional level.

he mainly works on the legal aspects of the relationship between the State and the market with regard to services of general interests and welfare systems. His recent publications include: I servizi socio-sanitari nel mercato interno europeo. L'applicazione delle norme dell'Unione Europea in materia di concorrenza, aiuti di Stato e libera circolazione dei servizi (2011); The Internal Market and the Welfare State: Anything New After Lisbon?, in M. Trybus and L. Rubini (eds), The Treaty of Lisbon and the Future

La storia del carcere è stata affrontata per lo più attraverso la ricostruzione degli aspetti giuridici, scientifici e politico-amministrativi che hanno caratterizzato l'avvento di una modalità punitiva del tutto peculiare alla modernità occidentale. Anche gli studi che si sono occupati del periodo storico analizzato nel presente lavoro, ovvero il Regno di Sardegna intorno alla metà dell'Ottocento, non sono sfuggiti a tale propensione, trattando quasi esclusivamente questi aspetti, del resto ineludibili per comprendere come un'istituzione, ai tempi ancora percepita nel segno della novità, sia potuta diventare, nel breve volgere di qualche decennio, uno dei cardini intorno ai quali si è consolidato il potere disciplinare dello Stato nazionale.

The question “what went wrong?” is a simple, common sense question. Confronted with adverse events, human beings show a deeply engrained tendency to ask what, if anything, did go wrong? Time and again this powerful question resonates as a critical reaction to an adverse set of facts, for which someone may have to account. Grappling with harm suffered, an individual, or an entire community, will look for a source of disorder. In a sense, this is what makes us human.1 The old intuition is that disaster follows once the “natural” order of society is undone by a human violation of an ethical or metaphysical principle of order. In many cultures, failing to obey divine precepts, or to observe the rituals and customs, is wrongdoing and a recipe for misfortune. Man’s fall from heaven — if you like — is a case in point here.

The study of legal transplants provides a vital critical supplement to mainstream theories about legal change. Legal transplants are not exceptional or isolated occurrences, despite the economic, social, political and cultural barriers that separate the world's legal systems. This Article goes beyond traditional approaches to the study of transplants by substituting the figurative language of transplants with explicit theory about how legal change is produced. It first provides a brief account of what the literature on legal transplants has achieved so far in terms of "macro" explanations of legal change currently available. It then argues that legal transplants as social acts performed by individuals call for a study of the "micro" level of engagement with legal change by individuals. The key notion that is advanced to explore this dimension is the notion of mediated action, which denotes action that is performed by individuals making use of features of the environment as tools to interact in a specific setting. The notion of mediated action was first introduced in cultural-historical psychological investigations of the social formation of the mind. As social acts, legal transplants represent instances of mediated action. The last part of this Article highlights how legal transplants raise questions of justice and discusses briefly how the new approach to the study of transplants advocated here relates to them.

This paper distinguishes among various natual law approaches, and explains how classical natural law could hold that there is no there is no absolute right or wrong beyond the endless variety of customs.

(2014) 8 Journal of Comparative Law 13-25

This paper analyses EU law as a communicative environment which is dominated
by an unprecedented level of heteroglossia in legal communication. Each text enacted
by the EU is an historic artefact representing a plurality of registers, of points of view, and styles, leading to inevitably hybrid utterances, which altogether give
voice to the European Union in the many languages of Europe.

Published in Translating the DCFR and drafting the CESL
A pragmatic perspective edited by B. Pasa & Lucia Morra, Sellier, Munich, 2014

This paper explores how the culture of the community of lawyers involved in the application of European law in the Member States is changing as a result of efforts to cope with the multilingual dimension of EU law. It is now published in
Susan Sarcevic (ed.) Language and Culture in EU Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Ashgate 2015