The son of a bourgeois family, Norberto Bobbio graduated in law from Turin University under the guidance of Gioele Solari (1872–1952), a legal philosopher who was the mentor of several first-class scholars, among them Renato Treves (1907–1992). Bobbio was a professor of philosophy of law on the law faculties of the Universities of Camerino, Siena, Padua, and Turin. In Turin, he contributed to establishing the Faculty of Political Sciences, where he also served as dean and professor of political philosophy.

Originally a follower of German phenomenology, Bobbio soon became an advocate of analytical philosophy and the founder of an Italian movement of legalphilosophical thought that combined Hans Kelsen's (1881–1973) normativism with an English style and empirically oriented linguistic analysis. This vision, expounded in many works of ...