Cases and materials on Italian private law

The idea of this book sprung up in connection to the course “An Introduction to Italian Private Law” that we have been holding since 2012 at the University of Milan. The course was conceived in connection with the internationalization program that the Faculty of Law is promoting in order to attract foreign students and to prepare Italian students to work within an increasingly globalised legal profession. Our students come from different European countries (Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Poland, Norway, Finland, and others), from the East (China and Korea especially), and from Latin America; some Italian students attend the classes as well. Most of the participants are Law students, but some of the foreigners have no background in law. We thus had to provide a simple but clear presentation of the main legislation and doctrines of Italian private law, understandable for people who do not come from a civilian legal system, do not belong to the Western tradition, or are perhaps not even familiar with law in general; at the same time, we wanted to stimulate the interest of the reader and for this reason we decided to offer, in class and in this book, a sketch of recent judgments of the Court of Cassation, together with our own commentary on them. A book focused on the sources of Italian law necessarily implies problems of translation of the Italian legal terms. For a long time, comparative law scholars have pointed out that every translation implies a complex intellectual work that aims to understand the “deep” meaning of what one wants to translate and to identify a possible correspondent. However, this correspondence often does not exist at all or it may happen that there is, in the two languages, a word which has the same etymological root but different legal meaning; moreover, an English word can have a specific legal meaning for a common lawyer but the Italian correspondent may be different, thus the translation may appear odd to an English native speaker. Presenting Italian law in English to a foreign addressee implies using a vehicular language which is neither the language of the speaker and of the sources of law, nor is the addressee’s language nor is the language of a mother tongue common lawyer. The presentation of a complex and articulated branch of law such as private law implies making choices that are often very demanding and idiosyncratic. In line with the traditional approach of the Italian school of comparative law, we have opted for providing for an introduction to what are historically considered the pillars of private law: contracts, property, torts and succession. We have then added a brief update about the recent reforms that have affected family law. Finally, a chapter on sources of law cannot be missed since most of the time students encounters a number of problems in understanding the articulated system of multilevel legislation.