Tomeo, Vincenzo (1930–1990)

Vincenzo Tomeo was a Milanese disciple of and among the protagonists of a new wave of Italian sociolegal studies along diverse lines of theoretical thinking and empirical research. Embarking on his academic career in the mid-1960s after a period spent at the Milan Provincial Administration as a civil servant, Tomeo first taught as an assistant professor and lecturer in sociology at Milan University. In 1976, he won the first public competition ever held in Italy for a tenured chair in sociology of law, at Messina University. The university would later name its sociology department after Tomeo. In 1981, he was called back to his original law faculty in Milan to replace Renato Treves (1907–1992) on the latter's retirement; there, he taught sociology of law until his untimely death in 1990.

Tomeo's varied scientific interests ranged from the social effects of electoral and party systems—to which he devoted a detailed analysis in a 1967 book—to law and communications, from deviance and social control to law and social conflict. He personally contributed to the interdisciplinary investigation of the Italian judiciary, which Treves supervised in the 1960s, with a masterful 1973 study based on both content analysis and group experiments of judicial and police icons in Italian movies. Tomeo's thoughtful insight into the research findings led him to formulate the idea that people perceive judges socially as “interpreters of social conflict” rather than of law—a formula whose fortune has been durable in Italy.

Considering society to be atomistic and conflict determined, although power related, Tomeo developed a critical analysis of deviance, concluding that it should not correspond to a label, as the interactionist tradition suggested, because it is in itself scientifically untenable. Deviance, in his view, is ultimately “dissolved” in an ever-changing multitude of social and individual attitudes and preferences and in a normative space of increasing uncertainty, which prevent both normality and even lawful behavior from being defined.

Tomeo summarized his views in a concise and clear-sighted book published in 1981, which offered a critique of classical functionalism and portrayed law as “the structure of social conflict.” Echoing philosophical relativism, he referred specifically to macro and micro conflict theories, irrespective of their ideological connotations, from Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), and Lewis Coser (1913–2003), to Ralf Dahrendorf. Tomeo saw law as a tool called on to circumscribe and separate the areas of autonomy of the most widely varied social groups, with unpredictable degrees of success.