Trento e la comparazione giuridica: voci, esperienze, riflessioni: dalla testimonianza di Rodolfo Sacco e Mauro Cappelletti

The book contains several contributions concerning various aspects of legal comparison, on which numerous Italian and foreign scholars and experts of comparative law have been involved in three connected events organized by the Faculty of Law of Trento on September 22 and 23 of 2022. The aims of the events have been manifold. The first part has focused on the analysis and assessment of the transformations of the study of comparative law in Trento, which has been an essential feature of the Faculty of Law of Trento from the time of its establishment in the 1980s. This analysis starts with two leading figures of comparative law, Rodolfo Sacco and Mauro Cappelletti, who both had a significant link with Trento. The first part of the book investigates the fundamental contribution of Rodolfo Sacco – who has been one of the founders of the Faculty of Law of Trento – to contemporary comparative law. In the second part the analysis focuses on Mauro Cappelletti, who started his career in Trentino, and later became one of the most important innovators of comparative law worldwide. The analysis of these two leading scholars highlights the relevance of their work both for the methodological aspects and the substantive issues, and the profound innovations they have introduced in traditional comparative law. The third part of the book gathers contributions concerning the new boundaries and features of contemporary comparative law in relations to three dimensions: first, the challenges related to the need to incorporate non-Western legal traditions in comparative law, which requires a change of subject matter, methods and aims. In the second section, the analysis focuses on the relationship between comparative law and other scientific disciplines, both in social sciences and other fields of knowledge; also in this context, a wider and more integrated approach requires a change of both methodological and substantive features. Finally, the third section deals with the role of taxonomies in comparative law, particularly the public law/private law divide, analysing the way in which their variation across space and time requires a critical revision, in order to be able to describe and analyse the evolution of contemporary law in its global dimension.