Constitutional Pluralism Avant La Lettre?: On Santi Romano’s L’ordinamento Giuridico

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Santi Romano’s L’ordinamento giuridico, on the occasion of its publication into English for the first time (S. Romano, The Legal Order, M. Croce ed., M. Croce trans. (Routledge, 2017). It seeks to locate Romano’s pluralism within the contemporary landscape of anglophone legal pluralist scholarship. Dividing the legal pluralist landscape into weak, moderate and strong pluralism it argues that, notwithstanding the fact that Romano seems to adopt a ‘strong pluralist’ approach to legal pluralism – where law is not the exclusive preserve of the state but exists in many areas of social and cultural life – and the fact that he has been labelled a conservative statist in his native Italy – making him a ‘weak pluralist’ who maintains that law is the exclusive preserve of the state – that he is best viewed as adopting a ‘moderate pluralist’ approach to legal pluralism in a manner similar to the constitutional pluralism of Neil MacCormick. The paper concludes that, in adopting his moderate pluralist position, Romano in fact presaged many features of the influential ‘constitutional pluralist movement’ which emerged fifty years after the original publication of the book.