RISULTATI RICERCA

With specific reference to the problems deriving from the end of security measures, this article analyses the methods of granting, the judicial practice, the criteria of evaluation and the quantitative trends of revocation judgements, both at and in advance of the end of term, of measures of commitment to judicial psychiatric hospitals (in accordance with Art. 222 of the Italian Criminal Code) as practised by the San Luigi JPH in Castiglione delle Stiviere. For this purpose, all the files relating to applications for advance revocation and to judgements of revocation at term heard in the period from 1992 to 2002 by the Mantua Surveillance Magistrate, which has jurisdiction in the area, were examined, whenever possible highlighting the criteria, the characteristics and the problems of the revocation orders issued. All this was of course conducted in an eminently qualitative light and without any claim whatsoever to being exhaustive, considering the unique nature of the source used and the peculiarity of the structure analysed with regard to other comparable institutions in Italy. Lastly, two recent judicial orders are reported and commented on in brief. While on the one hand bearing witness to the significant change that has taken place in the legislative framework, on the other they enable security measures to be adopted that are different from the ones foreseen in Art. 222 of the Criminal Code, thus offering a sustainable type of solution.

The recent spread of methods of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Italy seems to be following a trail blazed some thirty years ago by the informal justice movement in the United States. While awaiting the opportunity for field verification of the effects of these practices on the administration of Italian justice, this article attempts to list some of the fundamental characteristics of a movement that made skilled use, in political terms, of a unique alliance between the conservative right and the radical left, whose common terrain was their declaration of the limits of formal legality. In theoretical terms, a comparable alliance was forged in the framework of a heated interdisciplinary debate between exponents of sociology, anthropology and legal science, who focused on the dispute as their common unit of analysis, seeing it as a conceptual link capable of uniting law and society, thus furthering a decisive semantic shift, of considerable significance, away from the language of rights and towards the language of interests and of needs.

This article is based on a field research in the area of Bologna on the matter of halal slaughtering, the method of butchering that accords with Islamic religious practice. The research focuses on the migrants’ strategies for practising Islamic methods of slaughtering in the European context: it gives a perspective on expectations, negotiations and actions in different social subsystems, based on reviewing the literature, undertaking second-level statistical analysis, directly observing halal butchers’ shops and interviewing Islamic butchers, imams, bureaucrats and the representatives of shopkeepers unions. Halal slaughtering was studied from two different perspectives: on the one hand, the everyday life of Islamic butchers’ shops and, on the other, an exceptional festival the Aid al-kabir. Attention is focused primarily on the relationships between informal arrangements and institutional frameworks, also in a comparative perspective.

This essay investigates the truth of human suffering in relation to the images of it acquired by the external observer. From a point of view extraneous to moral discourses, the essay suggests that observing suffering requires construction, an artful description, which in turn constitutes the responsibility of the observer. The paper begins with an analysis of narratives of trauma and victimisation as schemes of communication used by a complex society to account for a world out of control; thereafter, Wittgenstein's argument on the obsolescence of suffering in modernity is introduced to enable the question of a responsibility that does not yet follow a normative model to be specified. The subsequent sections look at Auden's poem and Brueghel's painting mentioned there as artful descriptions par excellence. This essay is plainly not modernist in inspiration, for it questions the very idea of truth, so it is not postmodernist at all.

The term gypsy law is used to describe the set of rules perceived by the gypsies to be binding, the social control strategies within their groups and the mechanisms that have developed for solving disputes within the community. Since gypsy law is oral, anthropology of law probably offers the most appropriate perspective for its examination, in both theoretical and methodological terms. As the structure of the community’s law is naturally influenced by several aspects of gypsy culture, they are analysed here in brief: the nomadic lifestyle, diaspora and fragmentation that have long been characteristic features of the gypsy people; the social organisation found in the great majority of groups and, lastly, the family, an institution of fundamental significance, especially in determining the rôle played by each individual within the group.

This article explores the ways in which the rationality of labour law can be maintained at the national (local) level, at a time when the global level seems to impose its own techniques and therefore disorient national legal strategies. Both individual and collective labour law are under pressure, when it comes to conforming to supranational standards. The enforcement of EU law, also through such non-binding regulatory techniques as the open method of co-ordination of employment and social inclusion policies, is taken into account. The European legal order constitutes a significant example of a regional system of rules able to counterbalance the weaknesses of the global system. The latter is still uncertain on its feet with regard to establishing the basic principles of labour law. The ILO 1998 Declaration of Fundamental Principles is discussed, as are such recent ILO programmes as the one on ‘decent work’. The article shows how the circulation of labour standards is beneficial to the enrichment of international sources. It also underlines the need to defend the rationality of labour law by enhancing national institutions including organisations that represent social dialogue partners and by doing so with complete awareness of the appearance on the scene of new global organisations, such as the ones which started being active in Seattle in 1999.

Amedeo G. Conte’s paper Kanon is a philosophical analysis of the notion of regularity (regolarità, Regelmässigkeit, régularité). Conte distinguishes between four forms of regularity: (i) nomonomic regularity; (ii) nomophoric regularity; (iii) nomotropic regularity; (iv) nomological regularity. Nomonomic regularity is the regularity of actions which are performed for the sake of a rule, um einer Regel Willen (cf. Immanuel Kant’s phrase um des Gesetzes Willen). Nomophoric regularity is the regularity of the actions which are performed according to a rule, gemäss einer Regel (cf. Kant's phrase gemäss dem Gesetze). Nomotropic regularity is the regularity of the actions which are performed as a function of a rule. Nomological regularity is the regularity of the actions which are performed regularly, but without a rule. Nomonomic regularity, nomophoric regularity and nomotropic regularity are forms of nomic regularity (a nomic regularity is a rule-related regularity); nomological regularity is an anomic regularity (an anomic regularity is a regularity without rules).