Antropologia giuridica e sociologia del diritto

Legal and Sociological Anthropology of Law (by Alberto Febbrajo) - ABSTRACT: Drawing on a recent book by Rodolfo Sacco, Antropologia giuridica (Legal Anthropology), this article tackles the prejudicial question of how to define law differently from the positive law that, conceptually speaking, constitutes the most important benchmark shared by the sociology and the anthropology of law, before then attempting to demonstrate certain relevant convergences between legal sociology and anthropology with regard to the three fundamental problems: a) of the institutionalisation of the law, which calls for a methodology capable of constructing the gradual, collective formation of laws other than those established by statutory orders, with neither times nor authors that can be identified unequivocally; b) of the selection of the law, which calls for the elaboration of a theoretical support structure capable of generating evolutionary hypotheses tailored to capturing and explaining the influence exerted by such orders on statute law; c) of the stabilisation of the law, which calls for the use of a series of concepts capable of revealing the links between laws and elementary needs that contribute to compliance with them, regardless of the changes that take place in laws in positive legal orders. Lastly, the article sets out to emphasise certain ideological implications of the two opposed models of legal anthropology, known as the limit model and the possibility model, to which the sociology of law can refer, and certain changes in the legal culture espoused by legal operators today, related to the phenom- ena of globalisation and of transition, which seem to call for greater anthropological awareness on the part of socio-legal research.

Alberto Febbrajo, Antropologia giuridica e sociologia del diritto in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 1/2008, pp 27-45, DOI: