Philosophy and Politics of Law

The first objective pursued by the teaching is for students to acquire the basic legal concepts and main coordinates of current constitutional systems in order to be able to deal with the relations between politics and law and the public debate on fundamental rights with appropriate language and conceptual tools. The teaching then aims to provide tools for understanding and critical analysis, from theoretical texts, legislation and judgments, of the processes of social and legal formation of fundamental rights in specific areas that may vary from year to year.

At the end of the course students should have acquired:
- knowledge of the main concepts, categories and distinctions of legal language with special reference to contemporary legal systems and the capability to use them properly;
- understanding of central issues in the theoretical reflection on law;
- understanding of the different forms of legal action and of their link with political objectives and strategies and with different conceptions of justice;
- capability to apply the concepts elaborated in the theoretical reflection on law to the analysis of norms and cases and to associate them to different options as regards the politics of law;
- capability of reading and analysing texts in normative theory;
- capability to compare and discuss different normative positions.