SHIFT – New Legal Journals and the Italian Constitutional Turn in the Long 1970s investigates the transformation of Italian legal culture and the
implementation of the Constitution through the study of legal journals founded or re-founded between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The project starts
from the hypothesis that the realisation of the Constitution was not only achieved through legislation, institutional reforms or judicial decision-making, but
was also a cultural and collective process shaped by legal doctrine, editorial networks, judicial debates and interdisciplinary exchanges.
Although legal periodicals have often been recognised as key observatories of legal debate, no systematic study has yet analysed the journals created or
reshaped in Italy during this period as an interconnected field. SHIFT addresses this gap by treating legal journals not as isolated repositories of articles, but
as active vehicles in the process of constitutionalising Italian law: spaces of theoretical elaboration, instruments for selecting themes, laboratories of new
legal vocabularies, and bridges between universities, courts, legal professions, reform movements and the public sphere.
The project will reconstruct editorial boards, contributors, sections, programmes, case notes, reviews, debates and archival traces, in order to understand
how journals contributed to the critique of legal formalism, the centrality of constitutional principles in interpretation, the emergence of new rights and social
subjects, the changing role of the judiciary, and the interaction between law and the social sciences. It will also address the transnational circulation of legal
ideas, especially in relation to Germany, France and England, examining how Italian journals received, reworked and disseminated debates on
methodological reform, antiformalism and critical approaches to law.
SHIFT combines textual and conceptual analysis, comparative legal-historical research, prosopographical investigation and selective digital mapping. It will
distinguish between a core corpus of journals to be analysed systematically and a contextual corpus to be used for comparison. Its outputs will include a
structured database/annotated repertory of journals, contributors and key debates; peer-reviewed publications; five collective volumes; seminars and
conferences; a civic and constitutional education manual; podcasts and videocasts; and training activities for students, teachers, lawyers and magistrates.
By reconstructing legal journals as collective laboratories of legal innovation, SHIFT will offer the first systematic historical-legal interpretation of their role in
the constitutionalisation of Italian law in the long 1970s. It will provide historical depth to contemporary debates on rights, equality, legal interpretation,
democratic conflict and the relationship between law and social change, while producing resources for scholars, schools, legal professionals and civil
society.
implementation of the Constitution through the study of legal journals founded or re-founded between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The project starts
from the hypothesis that the realisation of the Constitution was not only achieved through legislation, institutional reforms or judicial decision-making, but
was also a cultural and collective process shaped by legal doctrine, editorial networks, judicial debates and interdisciplinary exchanges.
Although legal periodicals have often been recognised as key observatories of legal debate, no systematic study has yet analysed the journals created or
reshaped in Italy during this period as an interconnected field. SHIFT addresses this gap by treating legal journals not as isolated repositories of articles, but
as active vehicles in the process of constitutionalising Italian law: spaces of theoretical elaboration, instruments for selecting themes, laboratories of new
legal vocabularies, and bridges between universities, courts, legal professions, reform movements and the public sphere.
The project will reconstruct editorial boards, contributors, sections, programmes, case notes, reviews, debates and archival traces, in order to understand
how journals contributed to the critique of legal formalism, the centrality of constitutional principles in interpretation, the emergence of new rights and social
subjects, the changing role of the judiciary, and the interaction between law and the social sciences. It will also address the transnational circulation of legal
ideas, especially in relation to Germany, France and England, examining how Italian journals received, reworked and disseminated debates on
methodological reform, antiformalism and critical approaches to law.
SHIFT combines textual and conceptual analysis, comparative legal-historical research, prosopographical investigation and selective digital mapping. It will
distinguish between a core corpus of journals to be analysed systematically and a contextual corpus to be used for comparison. Its outputs will include a
structured database/annotated repertory of journals, contributors and key debates; peer-reviewed publications; five collective volumes; seminars and
conferences; a civic and constitutional education manual; podcasts and videocasts; and training activities for students, teachers, lawyers and magistrates.
By reconstructing legal journals as collective laboratories of legal innovation, SHIFT will offer the first systematic historical-legal interpretation of their role in
the constitutionalisation of Italian law in the long 1970s. It will provide historical depth to contemporary debates on rights, equality, legal interpretation,
democratic conflict and the relationship between law and social change, while producing resources for scholars, schools, legal professionals and civil
society.