Dentro la contingenza. Santi Romano e Karl Llewellyn sui modi dell'istituzione

While the term «institution» conjures an idea of fixity, stability, crystallization, Santi Romano’s and Karl Llewellyn’s institutional theories draw attention to the dynamical effort that is required to attain them. These jurists explore the ways – and especially the techniques and knowledge – that a group of human beings deploys as it seeks to preserve its «groupness». This article discusses how this ap-proach to the institutional phenomenon is paired with a pluralistic theory of law. Both Romano and Llewellyn see the law as a heterogeneous set of techniques, coupled with the knowledge that is needed to master them, based on which groups fend off the risks of conflict and disagreement. If this is the case, the law turns out to be nothing other than the process by which a group can continues to a group. The main lesson one can learn from these institutional theories is that the study of the legal phenomenon is the study of contingency, that is, of how the enduring conditions of potential clash and rift force human beings to yield new resources to make their groups go places.