BOOKS BY VALERIO POCAR

Presentando i saggi del dossier "Il lavoro e le regole: quale futuro oltre la crisi", l’autore si sofferma a riflettere sulla natura interdisciplinare della sociologia del diritto e sul suo ruolo in relazione alla scienza giuridica. Valerio Pocar, Presentation. Some remarks about the role of sociology of law [Interdisciplinarity - The role of sociology of law - Sociology of law v. legal science] Presenting the essays in the collection about "Work and rules: what future awaits us after the crisis?", the author dwells on the interdisciplinary nature of sociology of law and its role in relation to legal science.

The author describes how steps taken by the institutions to tackle migratory flows are connoted by essentially repressive mindsets that seem to be in breach of fundamental human rights, following an emergency logic that, on the one hand, is in practice incapable of controlling a phenomenon that is becoming structural in the process of globalisation and, on the other, obstructs adequate theoretical elaboration of the problems and thus knowledge of the varied phenomenology of migratory flows, making it difficult to prepare suitable tools for their legal and social regulation.

This article analyses the implications of a pluralist ethical orientation towards law and fundamental rights with regard to questions of bioethics and to discrimination based on sexual orientation. In a discussion of the tasks incumbent upon the secular state in a society whose distinctive trait is a plurality of moral options, the authors argue in favour of the state’s duty to guarantee pluralism and to repress cases of integralism that expose to risk the fundamental rights of the individual guaranteed by the Constitution, which is understood to be state morals. On this basis, the article then discusses the attitude that the law should adopt with regard to those questions of bioethics that involve individual moral choices and with regard to same-sex unions, concluding that the duty of the state is to guarantee the freedom of individual behaviours that comply with individual moral choices when those behaviours do not conflict with the interests of the community or with the fundamental rights of other individuals.

The author lists the most important violations of the rights of both women and men perpetrated by the Italian law governing artificial insemination, from the right to health and the right to privacy to the right to freedom of research, doctors’ right to independence of action vis-à-vis medical malpractice and, last but not least, the individual’s right to procreate, before concluding by remarking that the law consti-tutes an assault on the principle of the secular state and takes the form of a political act whose significance is symbolic, as in effect its function is to stop people having recourse to the techniques of assisted insemination while on the surface purporting to regulate its practice.

On the grounds of a socio-legal analysis of the duties arising from marriage and the consequences of their violation on matrimonial separation, the author argues that the attribution of fault for the breakdown of marriage has little significance in practice and may in some cases produce gender discriminations. He then points out how the legal and social regulation of the relationships between couples is evolving and suggests the abolition of the attribution of fault, although leaving the possibility to claim for damages in certain specific cases.