Bobbio, Norberto (1909–2004)

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 general theory of law written with exemplary clarity, was extremely influential for young generations of legal philosophers, even beyond Italy's borders.

Besides his studies in the theory and philosophy of law—including a number of masterful monographs devoted to classics—Bobbio contributed substantively to political philosophy, attracted by his enthusiastic commitment to civic affairs. He joined the Turin group Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), an antifascist movement of liberal-socialist inspiration, practiced his antifascist feelings before and during World War II, and was jailed for three months between 1943 and 1944, during the Italian Resistance. After the war, he maintained his political commitment, more as an intellectual than as an active militant, pleading with communists for freedom and with liberals for equality. He openly supported the rebirth of democracy in Spain, backed some significant initiatives of the Italian Socialist Party, and was appointed a life senator by President Sandro Pertini in 1984. In his last years, he often took the floor to denounce the risk of the collapse of Italian democracy.

Bobbio contributed significantly to law and society studies. In an early study, he analyzed legal custom as a normative fact, dispelling the most diffused commonplaces on the matter. He pointed to positive sanctions as a means for fulfilling the “promotional function of law” typical of the welfare state. He gave new impetus to the Kelsenian vision by inserting the notion of positive sanctions into his normative schemes, thus dispelling the idea that Kelsen's legal theory would be incompatible with sociology of law. He also demonstrated that normativism and institutionalism should not be mutually incompatible legal theories. He analyzed the human rights movement from the perspective of legal positivism, yet without missing the ethical grounds of social claims framed in terms of “rights.” In particular, he pointed to the processes of spreading and specifying human rights in a complex society, where people claim rights not only in the name of equality but also, and increasingly, in the name of diversity—a fundamental remark in view of the sociolegal analysis of rights.