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NEW TECHNOLOGIES – LAW – RECIPROCAL IMPACT – POTENTIALS – DYSCRASIAS
This paper discusses the relationships between law and new communication technologies from a socio-legal perspective, with a focus on artificial intelligence and the access to Big Data. The author contends that, on the one side, such innovations have brought about a revolution in information about law, in that they make legislative processes easier, offer new keys for the interpretation of precedents, enable the administration's inner machineries to be inspected or future deviances to be predicted and, no less important, impose a steady reorganization of work in all sectors, including that of the legal professions. On the other side, much still remains to be done in the field of the formation of law, even though experiments with 'smart' legislation and 'smart' contracts, as well as automated judicial decision-making, are already online. Here a dyscrasia still exists between legal and algorithmic languages. Law operates as a conditional action programme, based on the transmission of signs to be interpreted and the link between a factual premise and a deontic consequence ("if X, then Y"), as well as on the activity of "a third actor", whether law-giver, administrator or judge, "who doubts and decides". Conversely, learning machines operate by transmitting pre-packaged signals that exclude the "third actor's" interpretative and decision-making activity, especially delicate when addressed to understanding the motivations of human action or facing an unforeseeable future. The law's complexity therefore seems to resist algorithmic regulation and the question, nowadays, is whether technologies will adapt to the law and leave room for human intervention, or whether they will impose a kind of simplified law, in which human intervention will be annulled or drastically reduced.

Vincenzo Ferrari, THE ITALIAN SYSTEM OF JUSTICE THROUGH A SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE. This article offers a brief description of an extensive research on "Justice in Italy in the 2000s", conducted in the first half of the last decade by a group of social scientists led by the author. This project, whose results have been collected in nine volumes containing twelve monographic studies, focused on the structure and functions of the system of justice, as well as on how it relates to certain other systems of social action, such as the family, politics, the European context and the Bar. The author portrays the Italian judiciary as relatively closed towards society and highlights the main dysfunctions of both civil and penal proceedings. He adds that congestion seems to be a common feature of many modern justice systems and, echoing some recent American studies, lays down the hypothesis that they only succeed in functioning when semi-institutional alternatives are also available, even if prima facie incompatible with their basic principles, such as plea bargaining in criminal and negotiation in civil proceedings.

Résumé Dans les universités italiennes, la sociologie juridique jouit d'un statut assez favorable, spécialement au niveau de l'enseignement. Cela pourrait surprendre puisque la sociologie a été mise à l'écart pendant la première moitié du xx e siècle, à cause soit du néo-idéalisme qui dominait dans la philosophie italienne, soit du régime fasciste qui interdisait toute forme de critique du pouvoir politique. S'interrogeant sur ce phénomène de résistance culturelle, l'auteur remonte à ses racines historiques. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l'étude sociologique du droit a pu s'imposer grâce non seulement aux auteurs qui avaient toujours maintenu des rapports avec les cultures étrangères, mais aussi à maints juristes « purs », engagés dans l'interprétation des lois d'avant-guerre selon « l'esprit » de la Constitution démocratique de 1948, ce qui donna lieu à un mouvement antiformaliste ouvert aux sciences sociales.

In dem Beitrag wird die italienische Gesetzgebung unter dem Aspekt betrachtet, daß sie lediglich das Symbol des politischen Lebens darstellt. Untersucht werden die wichtigsten Gesetze zum Schutz von Recht und Ordnung, nachdem einige Aspekte des italienischen Strafrechts, die sowohl inhaltlich wie auch prozessual auf die Zeit des Faschismus zurückgehen, und die politische Situation um die Mitte der 70er Jahre dargestellt wurden. Beispielhaft wird die Diskussion um die Lex Reale, ein Gesetz zur Bekämpfung der faschistischen Subversion, vorgestellt. Es werden die Argumente der Parteien - alle, auch die Kommunisten stimmten dafür - untersucht. Der materielle Unterschied zwischen dem Gesetzestext, der politischen Erklärung und der politischen Praxis wird herausgearbeitet. In abschließenden Bemerkungen werden die Überlegungen in Verbindung gebracht mit dem Radikalenerlaß in der BRD. (RW)

Translated from the Italian by Peter Müller.