Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy

The author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history.

Paul Garfinkel (Author)

9781107108912, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 2017

536 pages
23.5 x 16 x 3.5 cm, 0.9 kg

'This elegantly written and widely researched study of criminal law in liberal and fascist Italy challenges the widely accepted view that Italy's 1930 criminal law code was fascist, positivist and anti-liberal in inspiration. Engaging with the wider debates on the relationship between liberalism and fascism, Paul Garfinkel's conclusions will attract the attention of scholars in many different fields.' John Davis, University of Connecticut

By extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with 'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from the Liberal (1861–1922) to the Fascist era (1922–43). Garfinkel argues that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform movement was driven not by the radical criminological theories of Cesare Lombroso, but instead by a growing body of statistics and legal researches that related rising rates of crime to the instability of the Italian state. Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.

1. Body count
2. Civilized violence
3. Force of habit
4. Tomorrow's criminals
5. Grapes and wrath
6. Coup, casualty and catalyst: the Ferri Code, 1919–25
7. Fascism's legal Risorgimento, 1925–31
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Fascism & Nazism [JPFQ], Crime & criminology [JKV], European history [HBJD]