The aesthetics of law starting from the work of Bruno Romano

This work is an attempt to reflect on the aesthetic dimension of law, starting from the speculative activity of Bruno Romano. The common thread underpinning Romano’s intense phenomenological research is to be found in the close relationship between legality and justice: an inseparable duo, because legality, often, does not coincide with justice. It follows that seeking to define the concept of law from a strictly aesthetical standpoint, referring only to the formal shell that objectifies it, is imprecise and misleading. Romano, adopting Pierre Legendre’s lexicon, defines the jurist as ‘an artist of reason’ whose work relates to things and people who are other than himself, and he follows this path without neglecting the search for the meaning to be assigned to his actions. We must now premise though that human beings differ from non-human living beings by virtue of their ability to distance themselves from occurrences: thought, which is manifested through language, leads man to question the deeper essence of things, without stopping at a purely observational knowledge. Non-human living beings are content with satisfying vital needs; only human beings can leap into ‘the aesthetic game’. Beauty, therefore, is a link between feeling and thinking: a mediating function between the sensitive world and the rational world. For this reason, in an aesthetical scope, legislative work cannot be reduced to an exercise that concerns itself merely with the appearance of the form; on the contrary, it must strive to satisfy the desire for justice inherent to every human being. Justice is therefore achieved within the space of this mediation, the anxiety of being recognized as a subject of law is a peculiarity of being human. Art in law becomes hermeneutics if it defines its scope according to universally valid principles that protect the exercise of a shared freedom. In short, the aesthetic state is what draws human beings towards the beauty of harmony, and urges them to be responsible, for himself and for others.