Filippo Fontanelli, Giuseppe Martinico & Paolo Carrozza (eds). Shaping Rule of Law Through Dialogue. International and Supranational Experiences

Abstract

Dialogue, this noble art, which, like many other things, was invented by the Greeks, is always a sort of collaboration, a way of trying to attain the truth. Perhaps this is why Plato used it as a literary vehicle when he wrote his Socratic dialogues, a corpus of pieces in which he laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Deeply impressed by the death of his mentor Socrates, Plato wrote some of the most brilliant and insightful works of all time, perhaps in order to keep on debating with his master after his death. In all likelihood, no-one since has ever had the same great ability to create such architectures of thought. His enjoyable and entertaining dialogues deal with essential topics such as the nature of time, politics, love, and death. Not only is his style concise and meticulous, with a proverbial ability to pose the right questions, but also didactic and kind. His dialogues enable all participants to engage in an inquiry which, despite not always being successful in reaching the desired goal, has at least proved to be a fundamental tool in the development of all expressions of human thought. The book under review is inspired, mutatis mutandis, by this very same philosophy regarding dialogue. As its editors (Filippo Fontanelli, Giuseppe Martinico, and Paolo Carrozza) point out in their introduction, �[t]he process of fragmentation of the international legal order and the absence of constitutional devices governing the connections between the various legal regimes can be reduced to a rational picture only through the activity of the judges� (at 23). This is why judges play a key role in creating and developing links between the different legal systems which constitute our multi-level judicial environment. The increasingly complex nature of the interaction between national and international judges has often been �