L’ "impero" come forma giuridica della contemporaneità

The paper delves into the legal implications of the recognition, from a global geopolitical perspective, of the notion of «Empire» as an independently identifiable political form. In particular, the analysis ponders the feasibility of a logically coherent concept of «legal empire», by assessing the existence, in certain legal traditions, of a special degree of «self-awareness», connected to historical and spiritual narrations of the nature and purpose of their own legal order. After evaluating the contribution of geopolitical interpretation and approaches to the methodology of contemporary comparative law, the paper puts forward some methodological implications stressing the potentially imperial nature of some legal traditions, from two main perspectives: in the first place, from the point of view of the spatial diffusion of legal orders, justified in the light of an alleged «spiritual» and «eschatological» superiority or desirability; in the second place, from the point of view of the development, in an eminently historical dimension, of peculiar self-narratives pertaining to the moral qualities of specific legal orders, thus reinforcing them vis-à-vis the «external» forces of legal harmonization. The main purpose of the paper is not that of asserting new criteria for the classification of legal systems, but rather that of stimulating a renewed debate concerning the specific qualities of the self-awareness of legal narratives in a multipolar world