Portale di Ateneo - En.Unibs.it

More than the knowledge of the Law or the training in a good application of certain procedures, what is important in the educational path of a Law student is the acquisition of a method that could let him think “like a jurist” and “argue like a jurist” (see F. Schauer, Thinking like a lawyer, Cambridge, 2009).
In this year, the teaching of history of Contemporary Law (until last year designed with the denomination of history of Middle Age and Modern Law) pursues the development of a reflection on legal reasoning, conducted through the study of certain areas determined by the specific knowledge of the jurists according to the standard of historic survey typical of the discipline. “Jurist needs indeed a double tendency: an historic one, for gathering what belongs to each époque, and a systematic one, for observing each concept and each holding, in its deep link and in the reciprocal action with the all” (M. Bretone).
In that perspective and according the characteristic of an advanced course, attention shall be directed to the terminology expertise of the jurist, underlying it operation.
This year, however, the topic of the course looks like an oxymoron: indeed, law and revolution appear as contradictory terms, the revolution seems to us like a moment of absence of law rather than an experience that is in a persistent relationship with the Law. The statement of one of the greatest exponents of the French revolution, Louis Antoine Leon de Saint Just (1767-1794), can help us to take another critical perspective on the topic. In a work written in the 1791, L'esprit de la révolution et de la constitution de la France, he affirmed: "Les révolutions sont moins un accident des armes qu'un accident des lois" (Revolutions are less an event of arms than an event of laws).
A general framework of the topics allows us to identify «two terms that involves in the definition of the word 'revolution'; the first one is movement (short, violent, from below, intended as a class action), that is especially attractive to the sociologist; the second one is change (radical rupture between two different systems), that assumes a juridical value at the time we try to find its basis of legitimacy "(Rossella Cancila). Therefore, the historian of law is oriented to look at the relationship between law and revolution taking a perspective that makes him able to gather in the revolution a phenomenon aimed at producing a radical overturning in the architecture of power and its forms of exercise; a phenomenon, therefore, designed to bring about a new legitimacy that is able to replace the one that precedes the revolutionary events, and, therefore, a legitimacy which is able to affect fundamentally the configuration of the political constitution of a country. It makes a deep renewal of the terms whose definition is at the basis of the organization of a society: sovereignty, people, commoner, power, intermediate bodies, etc.