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The recent evolution of administrative law has shown a gradual abandonment of a few notions considered central in the traditional description of the subject matter. Among these the notion of public interest stands out in a particular way.

Criminal law can be rightly considered the maximum expression of any society’s ideal image, of its Sollen , in any given time. More specifically, criminal law, also through its peculiar “expressive force,” has the power to describe (as a model) and shape (through its legitimate use of State violence) the very delicate relationship between the individual and the community, which is at the heart of any social narrative. Through the analysis of the changes undergone in the past decades by three specific features of Italian criminal law (two criminal offences, i. e. insult to a public official and false accounting, and one criminal defence, i. e. self-defence), this essay will try and retrace how this relationship appears to have changed under different political regimes and through powerful socio-economic transformations, possibly to reveal also the “deceptive” potential of criminal law itself, which we may assume to be related to its intrinsic “symbolic” quality.

The Italian private law landscape appears much clouded. Nevertheless, the sensation of turmoil is less significant with reference to family law, because it seems possible – after several reforms and the courts’ decisions – to identify a specific trend in this section of private law. This paper aims to examine the new trend of family law. In particular, the analysis of the latest reforms reveals a general shift to an individual dimension, offering not only a special focus on patrimonial issues and private interests, but also a relevant enlargement of children’s and parents’ fundamental rights. This “privatization process” gives rise to many doubts about the current role of family law in our legal system.

In the last twenty years different representations of foreigners have been presented through the law. They have moved from being mainly considered as workforce, in a period of economic growth, to becoming the dangerous illegal stayer of the typical “criminal law of the enemy” perspective. The security – logic has then cyclically been juxtaposed to the “humanitarian” one that inspired the latest measures related to the protection of the so-called refugees. The paper intends to dwell on how these representations of migration, often partial and stereotypical, are deeply affecting the imagination of the Italian community, and how this phenomenon can also determine some normative choices, which though, even at a distance of more than twenty years from the intensification of migratory fluxes to Italy, still do not seem to be able to manage immigration properly, nor to regulate the complex dynamics of multiculturalism.

This paper aims to demonstrate that there is a fundamental similarity between Italian literary history and the most significant contributions to labour law which have been put forward between the end of the nineteenth century and today. My claim is that there is a homology between literary history and legal history. Moreover, I argue that many Italian novels of the last few decades have represented labour as a condicio sine qua non of the Bildung of a person. Therefore, I interpret contemporary Italian fiction on labour through the literary model of the Bildungsroman . From this perspective, Italian contemporary literature on labour tackles the traumatic and disaggregating nature of modern labour. Furthermore, I suggest an innovative and useful model through which the relationship between literature and labour can be traced.

This article focuses on the representation of urban, suburban, and rural spaces in contemporary Italian literature, by examining a corpus of fifteen titles published between 2004 and 2015. 2004 saw the start of the Laterza series Contromano , which marked a significant increase in the amount of texts providing literary tours or maps of the most various areas of Italy; for this reason, that year has been chosen as the starting point of the present investigation. Particular attention is paid to three aspects: 1) The use of walking as a way to achieve a more personal relation to the “topographical system” (De Certeau), as opposed to the abstractions underlying urban design; 2) The questioning of the boundaries between centre, periphery and countryside, as well as those surrounding areas inhabited by ethnic minorities; 3) The emphasis on abandoned or neglected spaces, usually leading to a broader reflection on the human costs of neoliberal modernity. In conclusion, despite their diversity, all of the selected texts aim to bridge the gap between our subjective experience of space on the one hand, and the abstract processes regulating our lives on the other; in order to do so, they attempt to unveil a hidden rhetoric of space, whereby a given place can become a metaphor or a synecdoche for broader phenomena.

This paper focuses on how Italian narratives of the 2000s address the individual as a citizen of the nation-state. More specifically, it focuses on those narratives where writers or directors display issues of national importance and by doing so they deliberately intervene in the citizen’s pursuit of social identity. The aim of the paper is to point out how this impacts on national storytelling and how literature and film highlight and even exacerbate the crisis between citizen and state in the global era.

This paper is composed of two parts and a conclusion. The first part offers an overview of the Italian debate on common goods (beni comuni), highlighting the different authors and main schools of thought, illustrating the most significant definitions on a legal and case-law level, while homing in on the core of the underlying methodological approaches and the rela-tions between the most common interpretations and a number of well-known economic theo-ries. The second part aims to highlight the deep roots of the interpretative differences, on the one hand drawing connections with theories on the form of State and citizenship, on the other showing its relationship to the debate on public goods and to the evolution of the relevant leg-islation. The review ends with a description of a few fundamental and cross-functional charac-teristics of “common goods doctrines,” present in all the available literature, but valued and promoted in different ways according to the objectives of the different interpretations. The examination of these traits allows us to evaluate briefly the degree of compatibility between these different views and the current legislation, and the concrete possibility that the relative needs are actually met.

From its very inception modern “law and literature” scholarship has exhibited at least as much interest in what happens in the classroom as it has in what happens in the courtroom. Its principal ambition is educative, its primary audience student. In a strategic sense it hopes that the deployment of literary texts might enhance a law student’s appreciation of the human dimension of legal practice. The first part of this article will set the jurisprudential context, taking a closer look at the evolving legal regulation of “revenge porn,” as well as the critical debate which this regulation has stimulated. The second will then consider the dramatic presentation of the same issues and arguments in Placey’s play. According to Placey, any “time we write a script, we’re hoping in some way people will listen, that our words might have an effect, that they might shake people.” Evan Placey in “Sexting in Parliament: insights from the writer and director of Girls Like That ,” The Play Ground , March 24, 2014, accessed February 2, 2017, http://nickhernbooksblog.com/category/nhb-author/evan-placey. The final part will contemplate the extent to which this aspiration is realised in Girls Like That .

In this paper I argue ( i ) that the relationship between individual case and general norm shows interesting similarities between law and literature; ( ii ) that the emergence of one case as exemplary reflects the identity of the community in which the case emerged. ( i ) Paradigmatic cases are sources of normativity and they become normative by raising questions of precedent and repeatability: they perform the functions of a model and produce a split that involves singularity and law, accidental and necessary. ( ii ) There is a prescriptive force in exemplary cases and the passage from the case to the example is ethical from the start. The prescriptive force is performed in a context of which the exemplary case is the touchstone. The classification of a case as exemplary involves socio-identity-making processes of recognition that assimilate or differentiate human communities and fields of knowledge. Exemplarity thus shows how both law and literature can function as “identity-making” discourses.