Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy
 |
| Anteprima |
By
extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by
focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with
'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major
reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from
the Liberal (1861-1922) to the Fascist era (1922-43). Garfinkel argues
that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist
criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform
movement was driven not by the radical criminological theories of
Cesare Lombroso, but instead by a growing body of statistics and legal
researches that related rising rates of crime to the instability of the
Italian state. Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official
sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in
penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while
analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its
relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.
