Riccardo Cardilli & Stefano Porcelli (eds)Aspetti Giuridici del BRICS — Legal Aspects of BRICS

• Date: 16 August 2019
• Published date: 16 August 2019

BOOK REVIEW

Riccardo Cardilli & Stefano Porcelli (eds)

Aspetti Giuridici del BRICS — Legal Aspects of BRICS

(CEDAM, 2015, pp235)

Reviewed by IGNAZIO CASTELLUCCI

Professor of Law,Universities of Macau (Macau) and Trento (Italy)

This book was published as part of the Latin American Legal Studies Series

(Collana di studi giuridici latinoamericani). Legal Aspects of BRICS,isan

edited collection of proceedings hailing from an international conference

held in Rome on 6–8 May 2013. Both the conference and the book are the

result of efforts by the Centre for Latin American Legal Studies, University of

Rome Tor Vergata, as the organising body, in cooperation with other

research groups, including the ‘Giorgio la Pira’ Research Unit of the

Sapienza University of Rome, the Italian National Research Council; the

working group on legal studies of the European Council of Social Research

on Latin America (CEISAL); the Observatory on Codif‌ication and Educa-

tion of Jurists in China within the Framework of the Romanist Legal System.

Previous research efforts of the mentioned research groups were dedicated

mostly to the heritage of Roman law within Latin American laws. However,

their work in recent years has been characterised by a closer attention to

Russian and Chinese laws and how they were inf‌luenced by the Roman Law

tradition and system.

The ‘Roman legal system’ should be viewed, not just as a legal experience

belonging to the past, but as a living thing; a general environment of legal

thought, which provides a frame and/or a philosophical and technical

background as a component of a number of present-day national legal

systems.

In Roman law circles, recourse is frequently made to the conceptual

distinction between ‘sistema giuridico’ (literally, ‘legal system’, referred to as

the Roman frame of legal thought) and ‘ordinamento giuridico’ (‘legal

order’, more-or-less literally referring to each of the different national legal

systems working within that larger frame), in order to underline the different

nature of the two concepts.

1

Research conducted according to the approach described above thus aims

at unearthing the common heritage of Roman law present in current legal

systems, both to know these systems better (pure knowledge per se is an

acceptable aim for researchers) and to highlight the relationships and deep

similarities amongst legal environments considered quite distant by most.

This knowledge can be used for further developments, including operational

1

Catalano, Pierangelo (2006) ‘Sistema y ordenamientos: el ejemplo de América Latina’

in Schipani, S (ed) Mundus Novus. America. Sistema giuridico latino-americano 19-38.

178

(2016) 3(1) Journal of Comparative Law in Africa 178

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