Giorgio Berti

The last scientific pages by Giorgio Berti mix with a skilful hand a learned doctrine and a melancholy mood. Looking backwards to his first steps as a student at the University of Ferrara, and afterwards as a scholar of public law, he travels over again the cornerstones of his thinking that consists of a different way of looking at the administrative law as a complex system which springs up from a society that has the ambition of governing itself in a perennial struggle and compromise with an authoritative state.

Sovereignty the recapitulatory expression of the fundamental correlation between law and State or State power. For this reason the sovereignty is mother and daughter of the State at the same time because organization of subjects and positiveness of law: it tanslates the principles of natural law into the present.

The author dwelles upon administrative obligation towards society and upon private subject's warranty who is induced to take part in the processes of fulfilment the above - said obligation. The warranty is based on the relation arising from the administrative activity.

The Author outlines the formative processes of the juridical rules, turning over in his mind the fundamental connection between the political power, in the various historical evolutions, and the legality. He dwells upon the juridical language, the form and substance of the law, the political sovereignty and the national States, the symbols and the image of the law, and, particularly, upon the stratifications, in the time and in the space, of the political power, the parallel and independent growth of the law, of the juridical language, of the personal guaranties.

This consideration is composed of different passages which point out the deterioration and the transformation of legality and organization into the State of law. Actually there are a lot of sings according to which the old institutional characters and the correlative differentiations of the system of the sources suffer a kind of flowing back of different normative laws, they occupy the spaces which are abandoned by the territorial State. So, not only internal relations of the civil structure, but also external relations towards social, international, supranational or universal sources are discussed again. The interpretative and contractual activities are getting the upper hand over the order of the formal sources.

The article is a review of Paolo Grossi's book Prima lezione di diritto. It insists on careful and brillant sinthesys of history and law, on didactic finality and cultural inspiration of the work. Grossi gives a charming proof of the social origin of the legal rules and its system