NATURA DELLE COSE E METODO GIURIDICO

This dissertation concerns the legal and jurisprudential issue of the "nature of things". In the first and second chapters I provide an analysis of some of the main uses of the expression 'nature of things' in italian legal science and jurisdiction, focusing on their frequent occurrence in commercial and administrative law. Then, in the following two chapters, I try to develop an explanatory model of a legal method based on the notion of nature of things, as a means to determine the content of a legal system. In chapter III my central aim is to show that even lawyers who subscribe to this method, use it only when an identification of the relevant legal issues is already available. It's only in a subsequent moment - which following Mario Jori I call ‘determination’ of the content of law – that in these lawyers’ view the appeal to the nature of things bears its fruits, i.e. the possibility to improve our understanding of law through the study of social practices picked out by some legal concepts. Finally, in chapter IV, I focus on the peculiar treatment of legal concepts implied by this method. I maintain that we ought to refer to Kripke and Putnam thesis that conceptaul content depends upon the true nature of the things referred to rather than upon the descriptions or the criteria commonly associated to a concept. In this case, the criteria that can be defeated by the account of the true nature of a phenomenon are the ones established by the legislator. Unlike Kripke and Putnam, however, judges and lawyers who use the notion of nature of things enlarge the scope of this theory from natural kind concepts – for which it was originally conceived – to “social kind” concepts.