Emilio Betti: A Humanist between Law and Philosophy

Emilio Betti was not only one of the greatest Romanists and jurists of the contemporary era, but he was also a historian and philosopher. As a legal scholar, his writings on the great themes of legal his-tory and on the philosophers who have dealt with them certainly de-serve reconsideration and critical evaluation. In addition, Betti’s anal-ysis of the role of jurists and their prudential deserves attention. These include analyses and reflections on the different eras of Ro-man history, both during the Republic and in subsequent eras, which are still of absolute relevance today. In particular, it is the debate on pandectics and the importance of the critique of European pandectics that marks an epochal shift in the study of law. Betti was an eminent scholar of law, who studied it in all its forms, always studying law from a historical and dynamic perspective, and had been a teacher not only of Roman law, but of various legal disciplines, and above all of subjects that had the current law as its object, in particular con-temporary law.