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Legal Comparison beyond the Law in Late Rodolfo Sacco

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The relationship between language and law has been a kind of ‘ground bass’—to use a musical metaphor—throughout Rodolfo Sacco’s long scientific journey. In his own unique way, this father of legal comparison always caught that relationship emphasizing its asymmetrical aspects. In his works, language appears to overdetermine law and condition it with its semiotic exceedance. A peculiar respect that, in some ways, seems to doom to shipwreck any theoretical assumption implying self-referentiality as inherent feature of—in sequence—law, its means of communication and, therefore, its paths to effectiveness. On the other hand, in Sacco’s eyes the legal phenomenon seems to be rooted in some features of the behavior and even cognitive habits of human beings that in turn exceed the words of law and the morphology of rules. This view is almost the opposite pole to the idea that there exists in experience something like a specific ‘province of law’ determined and determinable in mere positivist terms. Nevertheless, by virtue of a scientific gaze that never unmoored itself from a positivist posture, Rodolfo Sacco conveyed his unremitting commitment to legal comparison to bring to the surface some hidden/silent generators—so to speak—of both legal experience and legal structures ‘observable’ through the language of rules. His overall theoretical proposal, which finds its synthesis and, simultaneously, a doorway to future research in the discovery of legal ‘formants’ and ‘cryptotypes’ as tools for analyzing law in action holds inherent relevance for legal semiotics. This Special Issue aims to orchestrate the contributions of valuable comparatists—many of them his pupils—and legal philosophers in an effort to enhance the theoretical threads between legal semiotics and legal comparison that are interweaved in Sacco’s works. The intent is to highlight theoretical profiles that have not yet been fathomed in the hope to promote further research in the area that lies at the crossroads of comparative law and the semiotics of law.

Editors

  • Elena Ioriatti Elena Ioriatti  &

    Elena Ioriatti

    Elena Ioriatti is Professor of Comparative Law at Trento University, Faculty of Law, Italy, where she teaches Comparative Legal Systems and Comparative Law Methodology. She undertakes research on comparative law methodology, comparative private law, legal translation, EU law language and interpretation. Her research analysis on comparative law theory and on the relationship between law and language has developed also through a continuous, stimulating dialog with prof. Rodolfo Sacco. She is Editor–in– Chief of the law journal Comparative law and language, edited by Trento University. Orcid: 0000-0001-7468-1433

  • Mario Ricca Mario Ricca

    Mario Ricca

    Mario Ricca is full professor in Intercultural Law at University of Parma, Italy. He is managing director of the online journal Calumet — Intercultural Law and Humanities Review. He has published several books on intercultural law. His research areas interplay among law, anthropology, semiotics, and geography. Among his latest publications: Intercultural Spaces of Law: Translating Invisibilities, Springer, Cham 2023. Orcid: 0000-0002-6569-3085

Articles (11 in this collection)