From pluralism to the material constitution and back

It is a pleasure and an honour for us to produce this Introduction to the symposium that The Italian Law Journal has kindly devoted to our recent book The Legacy of Pluralism: The Continental Jurisprudence of Santi Romano, Carl Schmitt, and Costantino Mortati (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). The book was written with at least a twofold aim in mind. First, it was meant to revive the theoretical potential of the long-lost tradition of legal institutionalism (sadly an almost unknown one in Anglo-Saxon academia). Legal institutionalism offers an invaluable entry point to the debate on the nature of legal orders as well as institutions that is not constrained by the conventional opposition between natural law and legal positivism. Santi Romano, Carl Schmitt, and Costantino Mortati possibly represent the pinnacles of the institutionalist stream of thought, and yet they remain relatively unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world (with the notable exception of Schmitt, who however is seldom studied as a representative of legal institutionalism).