Anello on The Phenomenology of Arnaldo Bertola

Giancarlo Anello, University of Parma, has published The Phenomenology of Arnaldo Bertola: Legal Categories, Cognitive Interests, Religious Habits, and Their Interaction into the Life of an Italian Colonialist. Here is the abstract.

Italian colonialism was brief, notably transient and disorganized, especially when compared to its European counterparts, but it was characterized by an amazing experimental inspiration from the legal field. Italian legal professionals working in the colonies were compelled to develop their own-often original and creative-legal approaches in managing the complex relationships between legal authorities and colonial subjectivities. This paper analyzes the extraordinary efforts of one such colonial jurist, Arnaldo Bertola. Bertola was a judge in Libya and Rhodes, a Professor of colonial law at the University of Turin 1930’s, and a legal expert in Mogadishu, Somalia, after the war. Bertola’s case is noteworthy because of his innovative thinking, his remarkable personality, his unusual cultural eclecticism, and his steady inner faith in the value of religious freedom. The essay explores his writings not only for his legal achievements, but also for his very human curiosities and uncertainties in confronting the stranger, the colonized, and the foreigner: in a word, the other.

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Comino, Galasso, and Grasizno on The Diffusion of New Institutions: Evidence From Renassiance Venice's Patent System @AlbertoGalasso

Stefano Comino, Università degli Studi di Udine, Alberto Galasso, University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Strategic Management, and Clara Graziano, Università degli Studi di Udine - Department of Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research, have published The Diffusion of New Institutions: Evidence from Renaissance Venice's Patent System. Here is the abstract.

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question by exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model that links patenting activity of craft guilds with provisions in their statutes. The model predicts that guild statutes that are more effective at preventing outsiders’ entry and at mitigating price competition lead to less patenting. We test this prediction on a new dataset that combines detailed information on craft guilds and patents in the Venetian Republic during the Renaissance. We find a negative association between patenting activity and guild statutory norms that strongly restrict entry and price competition. We show that guilds that originated from medieval religious confraternities were more likely to regulate entry and competition, and that the effect on patenting is robust to instrumenting guild statutes with their quasi-exogenous religious origin. We also find that patenting was more widespread among guilds geographically distant from Venice, and among guilds in cities with lower political connections, which we measure by exploiting a new database of noble families and their marriages with members of the great council. Our analysis suggests that local economic and political conditions may have a substantial impact on the diffusion of new economic institutions.

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Bessler on Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence on American Law

John D. Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing The Italian Enlightenment and the American Revolution: Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence on American Law in volume 37 of the Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy on American Law (2017). Here is the abstract.

The influence of the Italian Enlightenment — the Illuminismo — on the American Revolution has long been neglected. While historians regularly acknowledge the influence of European thinkers such as William Blackstone, John Locke and Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria’s contributions to the origins and development of American law have largely been forgotten by twenty-first century Americans. In fact, Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments (1767), significantly shaped the views of American revolutionaries and lawmakers. The first four U.S. Presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — were inspired by Beccaria’s treatise and, in some cases, read it in the original Italian. On Crimes and Punishments helped to catalyze the American Revolution, and Beccaria’s anti-death penalty views materially shaped American thought on capital punishment, torture and cruelty. America’s foundational legal documents — the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights — were themselves shaped by Beccaria’s treatise and its insistence that laws be in writing and be enforced in a less arbitrary manner. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin studied Italian and read or spoke the language to one degree or another, and many early Americans also had a fascination with Italian history and the civil law. Though On Crimes and Punishments is focused largely on the criminal law, the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights — written documents protecting individual rights — echo the Beccarian idea of a fixed code of laws. Not only did leading figures of the Italian Enlightenment mold Beccaria’s work, but Beccaria’s treatise — now more than 250 years old — influenced a whole host of European and American thinkers, from Jeremy Bentham to Gaetano Filangieri and from James Wilson to Dr. Benjamin Rush. Beccaria’s ideas on government and the criminal justice system thereby profoundly shaped American law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.