1 A Due Premise

Describing Rodolfo Sacco succinctly or classifying his scientific contribution into specific models, categories, or profiles is arduous, given their extraordinary brilliance and unique thinking.

To delineate Rodolfo Sacco’s contribution to general legal knowledge, particularly in civil and comparative fields, as well as his impact on academic life, law schools, scholarly associations, legal literature, treatises, encyclopedias and even broader literary genres - without limitations of place or time - I found it appropriate, from a methodological point of view, to elaborate a discourse that clearly marks the before and after states, illustrating the state of the art of all the aforementioned aspects preceding and following his scholarly contributions.

2 Legal Culture Prior to Rodolfo Sacco

It is therefore necessary to briefly reconstruct the state of legal culture prior to Rodolfo Sacco’s entry on the scene, putting it in its context and historical setting. To do this, I will start with some brief preliminary and personal notes on Rodolfo Sacco.

He was born in Fossano, located in the province of Cuneo, on 21 November 1923. His father, who had been a lecturer in the Philosophy of Law at the University of Turin, had retired there to practice law after being excluded from political and journalistic activities in the Turin area due to the dramatic events of 1922.

He attended the elementary and middle schools in Fossano and thereafter studied at a classics high school in Turin.

In 1941, due to family reasons, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law with the intention of pursuing a career as a professor of medieval history. With this goal in mind, he obtained a diploma in paleographic science and, driven by this interest, he published - as his inaugural publication - the statutes of the Municipality of Revello.

At the time, the academic environment in Turin was characterized by figures of utmost importance including, among many, Mario Allara, Luigi Einaudi, Giuseppe Grosso, Silvio Romano, Paolo Greco, Gioele Solari and Francesco Antolisei.

Sacco was particularly impressed by the first two: during his first year of study, he approached Mario Allara to oversee his thesis on the concept of legal interpretation. Once published, the thesis received acclaim in Italy from Salvatore Pugliatti and in Germany from Joseph Esser. Sacco, moreover, would have the opportunity to spend ample time with Esser in the fifties while teaching at the Institute of European Studies in Turin.

Luigi Einaudi tried to convince him to deal with economic and financial subjects, but by then Sacco had already started to work on his thesis with Allara and he sensed that he would soon be called to arms, as happened in 1943.

After 8 September, he joined the partisan movement, experiencing various significant adventures, and returned to the academic world, graduating on 5 February 1946.

He started attending the University’s Legal Institute, where a small group of notable figures operated, among others Sergio Cotta, Giovanni Conso, Marcello Gallo, Elio Casetta, Alberto Burdese, Filippo Gallo, Gastone Cottino, and Enrico di Robilant.

During this period, he authored his second monograph on good faith and a third one on the amortization of credit securities, which resulted from his collaboration with Paolo Greco. This collaboration led also to the publication of case notes in the Rivista di Diritto Commerciale (Commercial Law Journal).

3 Legal Culture and Rodolfo Sacco

Let’s now briefly describe the legal-cultural environment in which Rodolfo Sacco initially operated.

Within it, legal positivism prevailed. At the time, it was practiced in Italy by systematic and neo-systematic schools, formed on the original model of the German Pandectist School.

Legal positivism, as is known, directed jurists to focus solely on the laws existing within specific territories delineated by national borders. These boarders acted as dividing lines, separating one jurisdiction from another, distinguishing between what was inside and outside, between the knowable and the unknowable. These borders were perceived to represent the limit of the jurists’ intellectual scope, as Ugo Mattei and Piergiuseppe Monateri observed [1, pp. 8–9].

In this perspective, the binding of the law to a place, conveyed by the notion of geo-law coined by Natalino Irti [2], is closely connected, as is known, from a historical point of view to the conception of the sovereignty of the modern State, which according to a widely held view, progressively emerged following the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 [3, 4].

Therefore, to put it in Gino Gorla’s words, with the gradual affirmation of the positivist approach, jurists progressively passed from a universalist conception of law to a conception of law confined within a single territorial system, gradually becoming less open to external influences, and increasingly closed in a kind of splendid isolation.

It became a law sometimes celebrated as the best of all possible laws beyond space and time.

Already in the mid-nineteenth century, Rudolph von Jhering had bitterly lamented that the science of law had degenerated into domestic case law, where the scientific boundaries coincided with the political ones [5, p. 15]. And in the mid-twentieth century, René David had radically criticized a legal education focused on solely domestic law, defining it as culturally disastrous and anti-historical considering the rapid growth of transnational relations [6].

More recently, Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz pointed out that there is no ‘German physics’, ‘Belgian chemistry’, nor ‘American medicine’; these sciences exist on a global level [7, pp. 16–17]. Strangely, the field of legal science appears to be different in this aspect.

To demonstrate the absurdity of this perspective, even Sacco, in his maturity, used the analogy of a zoologist, botanist or natural scientist restricting the object of their study to the animals, trees and minerals existing only on this side of the Brenner and Simplon passes and the Mediterranean Sea, intentionally ignoring the rest of the world. Yet, he wrote, for about two centuries within the community of jurists, it has often been exactly like this.

Alongside positivism, the systematic and neo-systematic method of German origin, of which Mario Allara was one of the major proponents, also prevailed. This method led the interpreter, as juridical positivism dictates, to focus within the sole domestic sources on the sole academic and university doctrine, thus neglecting case law and practice. The latter were only occasionally quoted, if necessary, and as Giovanni Iudica points out, only to highlight the practical relevance of the selected issue.

Thus, the interpreter was inclined to prefer a logical and geometric method, aligned with Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (Pure theory of law), which implied the purification of legal data from references to morality, religion, economics, history, sociology or politics, carrying out a sort of “stripping away” of everything not strictly relevant to the legal data, as Alfredo Fedele wrote in his obituary of Allara, quoting his observation: “In this way, legal technique may appear arid; nevertheless, one cannot deny its seriousness” [8].

A valuable example of this method is contained in a writing from the middle of last century by Giuseppe Capograssi, who defines the method practiced by Francesco Santoro-Passarelli in his famous Dottrine generali del diritto civile (General Doctrines of Civil Law). Let us not forget that Santoro-Passarelli and Allara were contemporaries, both born in 1902, and fellow students in 1930. Capograssi writes as follows: “The book requires scholars, especially younger scholars, to engage with the system by approaching civil law with the code in hand, enriching the text with the code, shedding light on the code with the text, and reconstructing, through undoubtedly laborious yet personal effort, both the book and the code” [9].

In short, a system of sources significantly impoverished and incapable, even at that time, of providing an adequate professional culture to young jurists, whose horizon was limited to the territorial data only.

It is no mystery to recall that during Allara’s teaching period in Turin, the children of Piedmontese lawyers would frequently study at the Universities of Pavia and Genoa to avoid a legal education tied to the teachings of the master in Turin. Furthermore, Silvio Romano, who taught the course on roman law institutions, used to teach his classes with a closer connection to contemporary law. This approach aimed to compensate for and fill the gaps left by his civil law colleague in the students’ preparation.

In this context, the study and teaching of comparative law were almost absent from the Italian academic landscape, not unlike what happened in the converging experiences of all countries of the Western legal tradition. Already Frederick William Maitland and Sheldon Amos, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, attested to the lack of significant interest in foreign experiences [10]. René David and Rodolfo Sacco later agreed on this point. The latter emphasized that: “In the sixties of the last century, foreign law was still intentionally ignored, it was not normal to talk about it. The faculties in Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin, Padua, Bologna, Parma did not provide their students with instruction in comparative or foreign law” [11, p. XVIII].

A praiseworthy exception, however, was the University of Pavia - this is a personal recollection - where comparative private law, comparative public law and even Swiss law were taught, the latter primarily intended for Italian-speaking students from Canton Ticino.

This context must be completed with some reference to rare antagonistic signs: Angelo Sraffa and Cesare Vivante, on the one hand, with the Rivista del Diritto Commerciale (Commercial Law Journal), Mario Rotondi with the Rivista del Diritto Privato (Private Law Journal) and Salvatore Galgano, with the Annuario di diritto comparato e di studi legislativi (Yearbook of comparative law and legislative studies), on the other hand, demonstrated a keen interest in data from other countries.

Sraffa himself established the institute of comparative law at Bocconi University and endowed it with a legendary library of an international and cosmopolitan character, which was later maintained and enriched by Mario Rotondi.

Certainly, for various and different reasons, there began to be some dissatisfaction with the conceptual method then in vogue and with the study of law centered on ignoring foreign legal systems. Evidence of this can be found in the works of Gino Gorla on the interpretation of law from 1941 and on the contract from 1954, having as a significant subtitle “fundamental problems treated with the comparative and casuistic method” [12, 13], as well as in the anti-conceptual controversy involving jurists like Arturo Carlo Jemolo, and in the literature discussing the “crisis” or “death” of legal institutions.

4 Sacco’s Adventure

In this context, Rodolfo Sacco engaged in a series of initiatives, intended to enhance the contributions just analyzed and, above all, to progressively endow them with a complete methodological analysis, heralding a radical mutation and innovation of legal knowledge.

In brief: Sacco held conferences in Vienna at the end of the 1940s; in 1953 he published, in collaboration with Vera Dridso, an italian translation of Venediktov’s work on socialist state ownership in the Soviet Union [14]; he started teaching comparative law at the Institute of European Studies in Turin, succeeding René David and having Joseph Esser and Viktor Knapp as colleagues; from 1962 he taught for over thirty years at the Faculté Internationale, first based in Luxembourg and later in Strasbourg, where he had the opportunity to meet and spend time with the most esteemed European jurists; he published two monographs in 1959 and 1960: one on enrichment obtained through unjust act, using a comparative method and another on possession [15, 16]Footnote 1. In the latter he demonstrated the uniform acceptance of a single operational rule - attributing enrichment to the impoverished - among Italy, France, and Germany, though the rule was presented with different constructive and defining schemes in each country. Sacco’s use of the comparative and casuistic method already became apparent in this context, aiming to understand the actual rules, sometimes latent, resulting in the famous cryptotypes and revealing discrepancies between rules and their definitions.

In 1959 he began writing his work on the contract, which would be published in four gradually expanded editions, in 1975, 1993, 2003 and 2016 - the last three in collaboration with Giorgio De Nova [17, 18].

Of absolute importance in this work are, among many, his contributions on the contract with obligations solely for the proposer, on contractual autonomy and contractual types, on the judgment of worthiness to be undoubtedly assimilated to the judgment of lawfulness, on the consensual principle and the circulation of rights.

When in the academic year 1966–1967, he held the civil law course on legal transactions at the University of Pavia, using Giuseppe Stolfi’s Teoria del negozio giuridico (Theory of Legal Transactions) as a reference text, in his oral teaching he often referred to contributions from French and Germanic experiences, he repeatedly stressed the relevance of the factual conduct of the parties involved in negotiations, interpretation, integration, and execution of contracts, hinting at the importance of the conduct of the acting subject, beyond what they say or write, a residual legacy from a historical period where writing or speech were lacking or were significantly less developed.

During the Pavia period, an important conference on the enterprise in Soviet law was held in the spring of 1967 at the splendid villa of Tremezzo. It was attended by the world’s most eminent experts in the law of socialist countries. This event would have been completely unthinkable and impossible without the extraordinary and unrepeatable work of Sacco.

Thereafter, specifically within the socialist sphere, he authored essays that conveyed a high-profile methodological message emphasizing a comparativist approach. Examples include the Roman law substratum of civil law in the socialist countries (1969) [19], the invalidity of legal transactions in Soviet law (1979) [20], the presentation of the Zivilgesetzbuch of the DDR in collaboration with Giorgio De Nova and Gabriele Crespi Reghizzi (1976) [21], and the abuse of law in the Yugoslav system in collaboration with Crespi Reghizzi (1977) [22].

During the Pavia period, in the academic year 1967-68, Sacco held a series of lectures on property without using any textbook. Later, the lectures would be compiled into a volume typewritten by Paolo Cendon [23].

This course was another methodological manifesto and represented an opening to common law, to the law of the socialist countries, to public law. Until then these areas had been completely overlooked or ignored by scholars focusing on the subject. Significant emphasis was placed on historical, economic, political, sociological, and more… sources, on doctrinal, jurisprudential and praxeological components and on custom. These aspects were often disregarded by the dominance of written and spoken law and by periods influenced by enlightenment and positivism.

Custom here emerged as a significant source of law in matters such as the gathering of mushrooms, truffles, raspberries, mountain climbing and winter sports, which the law sometimes limited, implicitly acknowledging the importance and dignity of the customary source.

Also, during the sixties and seventies, Sacco travelled, studied, and held courses in Eastern European socialist countries and - what was new for him - in some regions of Africa.

The beginning of this geographical and cultural adventure was facilitated by Alberto Trabucchi, who appointed him as the dean of the newly established law faculty in Mogadishu.

From this point on, Sacco began in-depth field research not only in Somalia, but also in Zambia and Morocco. He became acquainted with esteemed scholars like Raymond Verdier, Michel Alliot, Jacques Vanderlinden and Etienne Le Roy. Sacco’s interest grew in ancestral, prehistoric, and protohistoric law, in legal ethnology, leading to his authoring of a series of works, translated into various languages, on Somali law and African law [24, 25] in general. He further developed the theory of mute law [26], which soon gained considerable appreciation among anthropologists and ethnologists, such as Rouland and Motta.

During the eighties, his scientific reflection directed his attention towards the methodology of comparatists and, more broadly, of jurists.

He elaborated one of his most influential works: the Introduzione al diritto comparato (Introduction to comparative law), which had seven editions in Italian (the latest one in 2019, co-authored with Piercarlo Rossi) [27] and numerous translations into various languages. Additionally, he authored the parallel work Sistemi giuridici comparativi (Comparative Legal Systems) with Antonio Gambaro. This work had also several editions [28].

It contained crucial contributions to legal epistemology that were destined to last in time, and that had already received significant recognition in Europe and worldwide. We will mention only three of them: (a) the theory of formants or components and of their dissociations, articulated in his most renowned article at global level: Legal Formants: a dynamic approach to comparative law, in American Journal of Comparative Law, 1991, pp. 1–34 [29]; (b) the theory of the circulation of models, developed without geographical or historical limits [30, p.113; 31, p.1]; (c) the study of the relationship between language and law in the history of knowledge, and the development of a new scientific discipline: legal translation studies [32, 33].

All three themes were further developed in a significant series of publications by our author.

a) From the first perspective, Sacco’s contribution involved emphasizing that each legal system comprises various components that differ from one system to another: generally they include a legislative component, which can be categorized into constitutional and ordinary legislation; a doctrinal component, including didactic classifications and political definitions, developed across various literary genres; and a jurisprudential component, which encompasses judicial sentences and practices, understood as stylus curiae and procedural rules.

Additionally, there are other formants such as legal education, dissemination of legal data, and transnational contractual forms, often elaborated by law firms.

Moving from the European tradition to other traditions, Sacco emphasized within the domain of socialist rights the formant, particular to this area, pertaining to the analysis of history and society as carried out by Marx and Engels, and further developed by Lenin’s practical application [19].

Shifting to laws of divine origin, such as Islamic and Jewish law and, more generally, religious law, such as Hindu law, Sacco emphasized the relevance of the religious component as an integral part of the legal system. Additionally, he highlighted the Confucian component in the study of traditional Chinese law and the supernatural sources component in certain traditional African legal systems [25].

Sacco made an immensely significant contribution to the study of the so-called mute law. He refined it in a monograph in 2015.

The mute law refers to an unwritten and unspoken law, however practiced from prehistoric times to the third millennium after Christ, although obscured by an enlightenment-based, pan-legislative, and fundamentally anti-historical tradition.

b) From the second perspective i.e., regarding the theme of the circulation of legal models, Sacco’s contribution, in adhesion to a widespread transnational cultural movement, was equally incisive, as he played a role in encouraging interpreters, alongside other scholars, to overcome ancient prejudices that had historically hindered this approach.

Among many, it should be noted that Sacco’s Master himself, Mario Allara, was convinced of the incomparability of continental legal systems with common law, which he didn’t consider a real law, because of its lack of codification and exclusive reliance on case law.

Strong doubts had also emerged regarding the comparison between capitalist and socialist systems because they were considered too different in their ideological assumptions and, lastly, similar concerns had also been raised by René Rodière regarding comparisons with economically underdeveloped countries or those with a civilization too distant in origins, developments, and outcomes from the Western ones.

c) Sacco also made a decisive contribution to the study of the relationship between language and law. It began with a fundamental observation: the word that conveys the legal concept, has a much lower potential for translation than the word that conveys a medical, engineering, chemical or physical concept, because the legal concept evokes a pure construction of human thought, which is historically and spatially variable, whereas the latter ones refer to an object of the realm of material things, such as an organ of the human body, an architectural construction, a mineral, an atmospheric phenomenon, etc.

Sacco observed that “in the past, jurists rarely showed an interest in the circulation and evolution of legal languages… and the transition from one language to another was always regarded as a problem… that was not perceived to affect the core of legal knowledge”.

Through his work, which he also carried out during his participation in international conferences on comparative law in Sydney (XII), Bristol (XV) and Utrecht (XVII), Sacco contributed to the launch, on a global and European scale, from Canada to Switzerland and the European Union, of university specialization courses on legal translation studies.

His sworn enemy was the error in translation. And, even more, beyond gross misunderstandings, the famous false friends, based on easy and superficial linguistic resemblances. His epistemological objective was to convey to the interpreter the awareness of the extreme difficulty in ensuring a perfect correspondence of a legal text between the source language and the target language.

Hence the study of various and different figures of translation associated to various contexts - the legislative, academic, professional, and contractual one - and the development of various subcategories of translation, from the communicative translation, dear to Paul Newmark, to the semantic translation, further developed by Gemar.

Sacco also dealt with the study of the impact of translation studies on the Italian legal perspective; with the difficulties of translating unwritten and unspoken law, and thus of transposing and conveying it adequately from one experience to another; with the limitations of translation, beyond which the translation would become unfaithful and misleading.

Hence the creation of a set of strategies and tools, aimed at ensuring the most faithful translation possible, on which his scholars Silvia Ferreri, Elena Ioriatti, and Barbara Pozzo happily worked.

To attempt to complete the overview of the master’s extensive legal contributions, it is necessary to mention at least one fundamental essay published in 1960 on the injustice of damage, where the author, dealing with continental legal experiences, reconstructs the systems of civil liability through a series of typical cases [34].

Moreover, it is essential to mention the thesis according to which, within the French area, in derogation of the consensual principle, abstract delivery functioned as a method of transferring ownership [35].

5 Sacco’s Contribution to Legal Education

Another aspect worth analyzing is Sacco’s approach to legal pedagogy in the various universities where he held leading positions, and in the large audience of his students.

Through his fundamental works: L’interpretazione del diritto (The interpretation of law) [12] and Il contratto (The contract) [13], Gino Gorla convinced Sacco that legal science, struggling with a completely unsatisfactory systematic method, could only renew itself by adopting the casuistic-comparative method.

The two found valid support in Mauro Cappelletti and as a result, they collectively reached four decisive conclusions: (a) the need to persuade Italian scholars in territorial law about the crucial importance of the results achieved through legal comparison, and of the usefulness of its methodologies; (b) the need to start an intensive dialogue with foreign jurists and to open Italian scholarship to influences from beyond the country’s borders; (c) the need to significantly innovate the curricula of law faculties by incorporating comparative subjects, thereby making comparison an essential component in legal education; (d) the necessity to raise a generation of scholars proficient in comparative and foreign law, capable to propagate and teach the subject anywhere.

Gorla engaged in dialogue with Italian civil lawyers, Cappelletti spoke to the foreign world, Sacco did both, but he also dedicated himself with tenacity to the modification of the ministerial curricula, to the expansion of teaching positions involving comparative studies, and to the training of his own students, adoptive students, and he also profoundly influenced the students of others. Alongside the scholarly contributions of enduring value made by the founding father and popularizer of the subject, there was a concrete and practical effort to disseminate and instruct others in this subject. In Trieste he successfully advocated for the activation of a course on comparative private law; in Pavia, where he had been dean of the faculty since 1966, he secured for himself the course of comparative private law, until then conducted by Rodolfo De Nova, who began teaching Anglo-American law. He also started courses in comparative constitutional law for Nanni Bognetti, law of the socialist countries for Gabriele Crespi Reghizzi and community law for Angelo Grisoli; in Turin from 1971, he taught comparative private law. As a secondary subject, he alternated between the law of socialist countries and African law. In 1979 he established a course on comparative legal systems for Antonio Gambaro, and a course on comparative public law for Giorgio Lombardi. Later, he introduced courses on comparative criminal procedural law and Anglo-American law.

In Trento, during the eighties, as president of the technical committee of the new faculty, he facilitated the broad dissemination of comparative legal studies, attracting the attention and praise of American, English, and French scholars, including among others R. Schlesinger, Rudden, Fletcher, Legrand, and Gordley.

Meanwhile, thanks to his authoritative work, the teaching of comparative legal systems spread widely. In 1994 the new ministerial curriculum for the law course finally incorporated an obligatory yearly course focusing on a comparative subject.

Currently, many faculties provide several courses, either concentrating on subjects specific to an area (common law, East Asia, Islamic law), or on thematic subjects (private law, constitutional law, criminal law).

A few years ago, a survey disclosed the presence of 29 courses in Turin, 27 in Trento, 25 in Naples, 23 in Genoa, and 21 in Florence.

A substantial group of students had formed around Sacco, who, in turn, inspired new scholars. The relationship between the master and his students was often very intense, involving ongoing collaboration exchanges and a profoundly fruitful dialogue both on the scientific and human level.

6 Rodolfo Sacco’s Participation in Academic Life

One last aspect to analyze, among the many that I have certainly overlooked, is Rodolfo Sacco’s participation in academic life, legal associations, their journals, and congresses.

Sacco taught with different roles and in various ways at Italian Universities: as a full professor in Trieste, Pavia, and Turin, as a lecturer at the Cattolica and Bocconi Universities of Milan, and at foreign universities in Berlin, Baton Rouge, Montreal, Toulon, Fribourg Switzerland, Geneva, and Mogadishu. Additionally, he had specific assignments in Aix en Provence, Nice and Lyon.

For a significant period, Sacco taught the subject of contracts at the Faculté internationale pour l’enseignement du droit comparé, where he worked alongside French scholars such as David, Rodière, Houin, Marty, Drago, Blanc Jouvan, Rieg, English scholars such as Hamson, Simpson, Thompson, and Parker, German and Austrian scholars such as von Schwind and Leisner, Strömholm among the Swedes, Ganshof von den Mersch and Limpens among the Belgians, Hazard, Crépeau and Whinney among the Americans and Canadians, Fragistas and Kokkini Iatridou among the Greeks, Kroutogolov, Tumanov, Knapp, Czachorscy, Ionescu, Szabo, Peteri, Naschitz and Blagojevic among the jurists from the socialist area.

He revived the Italian Association of Comparative Law from a situation near lethargy, especially with the assistance of Gorla and Cappelletti, rapidly elevating it to levels of excellence, prestige, and widespread participation.

He did the same with the Italian group of the Association Henri Capitant, nurturing friendships with Malinvaud, Grimaldi, Ghestin and Viney. Later he founded and largely fostered this association.

He collaborated with many journals, such as the Rivista di Diritto Civile (Journal of civil rights) and its directors Walter Bigiavi and Alberto Trabucchi; later, he joined the editorial board of the journal, fostering and promoting, among other things, contributions to the journal by experts of comparative and foreign law.

He guided highly successful collective works, directing the Trattato Sacco di diritto comparato (Sacco Treatise on comparative law) and the Trattato Sacco di diritto civile (Sacco Treatise on civil law), which expanded to comprise dozens of volumes. He founded, supervised, advocated for, and completed the Digest, 4th edition, updating it regularly, and personally composing nearly all entries on contract law.

This also symbolizes his understanding of legal knowledge, centered on the comparative and transnational examination of legal information, aimed at nurturing every single formant and component, without yielding to the prevailing trend, not only Italian, of prioritizing case law data.

He was a member of numerous academies: let us mention, among the many, the Institut de France (Académie de sciences morales et politiques), the International Academy of Comparative Law, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Istituto Lombardo, the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino.

He held several honorary degrees from the Universities of Paris 2, Toulon, Geneva, and McGill.

Anyone interested in comprehending the essence and teachings of Rodolfo Sacco should read the dialogic publication, edited by Paolo Cendon, titled Che cos’è il diritto comparato (What is comparative law), published by Giuffré in 1992 [36]. In this publication, Sacco engages in conversations with many students and scholars, addressing a significant array of questions.

In summary, Sacco received an arid law, to put it in Allara’s words, lacking in sources and restricted to logical, self-referential constructs with significantly limited territorial linguistic impact.

He leaves behind a cosmopolitan law, abundant in various sources, both formal and non-formal, explicit and implicit, without limits of space and time. This law is equipped with solid and sophisticated methodological tools of investigation and, to quote Graziadei, committed to a multitude of cultural registers and to an absolute freedom of themes without borders constraining its scope [37].

Each of us, within the limits of his or her capabilities, has the task, both burdensome and pleasant, of continuing his work.