Realtà sociale e scienza giuridica nel secondo Novecento: alcune notazioni

The essay analyses the contribution offered by legal scholars, and in particular by the Catholics, to the development of the legal method in the second half of the Twentieth Century, aimed at bringing together the legal system and social reality. After an overview of the state of the traditional doctrine of the 1950s (and of its veteropositivist positions, based on a rigidly formalist method), the authors examine the instances of renewal promoted by particularly emblematic legal scholars. These proposals were first developed on a philosophical level (by authors who reinterpreted the themes of natural law in a contemporary key) and in political activity (especially in the Constituent Assembly) and only later, from the 1960s, were they translated into real methodological theories. In particular, perspectives are analysed that attempt to bring law closer to social reality without betraying the postulates of legal positivism (albeit ‘tempered’), as a safeguard of legal certainty.