Pagine dall’ultimo Orlando. Storicismo e istituzionismo sulla soglia del secondo Novecento

Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (1860-1952) is generally considered the father of public law studies in Italy, as well as a leading political figure in Italian history. This is a collection of pages from some of his last essays (1947-1950), woven together in a unitary argument on the growing influence of fact on law. Orlando observes the demise of the nineteenth-century State, the rise of the Italian Republic, and a new international order. From this viewpoint, he highlights a deep change in the form of the State itself, borne of the unresolved and growing concerns for human rights and the preservation of peace. He adopts a non-originalist historicism, and an institutional, non-realist, approach to the relevance of societal facts in law. This is in stark contrast with the recurrent criticism of Orlando as a mere formalist and a dogmatist and bears an enduring relevance to the current debate on the methodology of constitutional legal science.