Appunti sui concetti di “tipo”, “tipicità” e “atipicità”

The paper addresses the conceptual circle among the legal notions of “type”, “typicality” and “atypicality” (or “non-tipicality”). Starting from the methodological hypothesis about the close relation between the theoretical-legal approach and the philosophical-legal perspective, in the first part the contribution focuses on any profiles of the legal type in order to highlight its complexity: the comparison (i.e. through Weber and Kelsen) between the “sociological type” and the “legal type”; the ambivalence and the pragmatic-performative function of the type; the normative dimension and, finally, the problematic nexus between the type (understood as a theoretical-legal category) and the crisis of the concept of “legal order/system”. The second part deepens any philosophical horizons underlying the current theoretical difficulty to draw the relation “type-legal order”: in particular, the point involves the increasing conceptual “irrelevance” of the notion of “legal type” as well as the philosophical “roots” of this scenario, which are paradigmatically represented by the progressive implementation of reticular models of law (also due to the dissemination of the notion of “governance”). On closer inspection, this contradictory framework entails relevant reflexes not only within the politics of law, but also as regards the “idea” of legal category: in the last analysis, it threatens the possibility to build up a “theory of law”.