Damiano Canale

Nel discorso giuridico e politico contemporaneo il termine "costituzione" non rinvia semplicemente all'organizzazione dei poteri dello Stato, ma ad una serie di principi condivisi posti alla base delle società democratiche, come la tutela delle libertà fondamentali e la salvaguardia dell'eguaglianza tra i cittadini. Osservato entro un orizzonte storico a noi lontano, come quello della Prussia settecentesca, questo stesso termine assume tuttavia significati ben diversi: esso non si lega ai principi di uguaglianza e libertà, quanto piuttosto alla valorizzazione delle differenze e all'integrazione dei suoli sociali nell'ambito dello Stato, che spetta alla legge realizzare. Il suo spazio di elezione non è dunque la carta dei diritti fondamentali, ma il codice civile, inteso a tutti gli effetti come una "costituzione delle differenze". Il volume intende risalire alle origini filosofiche e dottrinali del primo grande codice del diritto privato moderno - l'Allgemaines Landrecht fuer die Preesussischen Staaten del 1794, un codice a tutt'oggi scarsamente conosciuto in Italia -, fornendo una puntuale analisi della vastissima letteratura in lingua tedesca sul tema. La ricostruzione critica dei significati di quest'opera legislativa offre così l'occasione per esplorare un orizzonte concettuale sorprendente, All'interno di tale orizzonte, termini ancor oggi in uso come "legge", "obbligo", "diritto", "libertà", "persona giuridica", "giustizia", "costituzione", acquistano significati del tutto singolari, frutto di un'aspra battaglia tra modi radicalmente diversi di concepire l'uomo e la convivenza civile. L'accostarsi a questo universo semantico complesso e variegato può accrescere la consapevolezza degli usi odierni del linguaggio giuridico e politico, sottolineandone le aporie e la contingenza epocale.

Cosa succede quando il diritto esige un certo comportamento, o nega una certa opportunità, ma questo appare inaccettabile ai cittadini perché in conflitto con le ragioni ultime che giustificano le loro azioni? Il queste situazioni, il diritto diventa immorale. Sono conflitti che investono tipicamente la sfera personale degli individui: il governo del corpo, l’immagine di sé, le relazioni affettive primarie, i progetti di vita. In taluni casi questi conflitti diventano così rilevanti da mobilitare l’opinione pubblica, fino a scatenare vere e proprie battaglie civili combattute da chi rivendica una pretesa che il diritto nega, o contesta un obbligo che esso impone. Attraverso l’analisi della struttura dei conflitti tra diritto e morale e l’esemplificazione di casi paradigmatici – l’eutanasia, il matrimonio tra persone dello stesso sesso, la pena di morte – il libro consente al lettore di costruire un proprio punto di vista sulle questioni in gioco.

This collection of essays is the outcome of a workshop with Scott Shapiro on The Planning Theory of Law that took place in December 2009 at Bocconi University. It brings together a group of scholars who wrote their contributions to the workshop on a preliminary draft of Shapiro’s Legality. Then, after the workshop, they wrote their final essays on the published version of the book. The contributions clearly highlight the difference of the continental and civil law perspective from the common law background of Shapiro but at the same time the volume tries to bridge the gap between the two. The essays provide a critical reading of the planning theory of law, highlighting its merits on the one hand and objecting to some parts of it on the other hand. Each contribution discusses in detail a chapter of Shapiro’s book and together they cover the whole of Shapiro’s theory. So the book presents a balanced and insightful discussion of the arguments of Legality.

Legal argumentation has become one of the prominent research domains of legal philosophy in the last fifty years and its study has deeply influenced this discipline. One of the reasons of this is that the criteria of rationality and correctness which apply to legal interpretation and adjudication mainly consist in argumentative rules governing the legal practice. But how these rules can be properly singled out and analyzed remains highly controversial. With contributions from philosophers, logicians and lawyers, this book tries to provide a new framework, "Legal Inferentialism", for the analysis and critical assessment of such legal and philosophical issues.

Riggs v. Palmer has become famous since Dworkin used it to show that legal positivism is defective. The debate over the merits of Dworkin's claims is still very lively. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the content of the statute at issue in Riggs was given by the counterfactual intention of the legislature. According to arguments from legislative intent, a judicial decision is justified if it is based on the lawmaker's intention. But can legislative intentions be determined counterfactually? More generally, what are the discursive commitments undertaken by a lawyer or a judge, in an exchange of legal reasons, when using this interpretive methodology? This paper addresses these issues considering, in particular, David Lewis's “resemblance” condition and “relevant similarity” between possible worlds in the evaluation of counterfactual statements. The analysis sheds some new light on the debate on theoretical disagreements and shows that Dworkin's conception of law as an argumentative practice is not necessarily at odds with legal positivism. It rather allows us to look at it under a better light.

: La legalizzazione dell’aiuto medico a morire viene spesso osteggiata ricorrendo al cosiddetto “argomento del pendio scivoloso”: permettere questa pratica costituirebbe un primo e decisivo passo verso l’accettazione dell’eutanasia non volontaria e dunque dell’uccisione dei malati che costituiscono un peso per la società. Poiché ciò va evitato ad ogni coso, la morte volontaria medicalmente assistita non deve essere permessa dal legislatore. L’articolo analizza la struttura e le varianti di questo argomento, giungendo a mostrare che esso giustifica la conclusione opposta: la mancata legalizzazione dell’aiuto medico a morire potrebbe aprire oggi un varco a forme di eutanasia non volontaria.
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The legalization of physician-assisted dying is often opposed by means of a “slippery slope argument”: allowing this practice would be a first and decisive step towards the acceptance of non-voluntary euthanasia, i.e. the killing of patients who are a burden to society. Since this must be avoided at all costs, medical aid in dying shall not be permitted in the first place. The article analyses the structure and variants of this argument, and shows that it actually justifies the opposite conclusion: the non-legalization of medical aid in dying could open the door to forms of non-voluntary euthanasia today.

Frederick Schauer and Barbara Spellman have recently argued that the probabilistic treatment of causality is widespread in legal practice. Although judicial decisions are focused on single events, there are many aspects of the law in which the relationship between cause and effect is interpreted in probabilistic terms. Such as in social and natural sciences, also in the law what matters is often to predict ex ante the class of consequences flowing from a class of acts, and this kind of predictions govern legal judgments more than we usually believe. The view just outlined captures some important aspects of legal practice, which has been not sufficiently explored by the philosophy of law. However, in the paper I elaborate on the points made by Schauer and Spellman and propose some refinements of them. Probabilistic causal statements in the law often presuppose different concepts of probability. In other words, the expression “probabilistic causation” is ambiguous and needs to be clarified. Distinguishing between different concepts of probability may help evaluating the use of probabilistic causation in legal practice and to better understand its function in legal proceedings.

The concept of limitation is central to philosophical debate, as well as in moral and legal language. Article 1 of the Italian constitution, for example, provides that «Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution». One might ask what relationship the term ‘limits’ designates between the constitution and the exercise of sovereignty, and how these limits can be drawn. It is easy to see that the answer to these questions have important political and institutional implications, and condition the way we conceive of a democratic-constitutional legal system. This article reconstructs Kant’s conception of limitation from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of language and mind. In particular, the article shows that the category of limitation, and the type of judgements it relies on (infinite judgements), has semantic, pragmatic and cognitive relevance in Kantian philosophy, and also identifies how philosophical knowledge proceeds. Furthermore, Kant’s conception of limitation is used in the article to evaluate the way in which constitutional review is conceived by the two constitutional doctrines that contend the field in current legal debate: the doctrine of the “constitution by rules” and that of the “constitution by principles”. In the light of Kant’s understanding of limitation, nether of them is convincing and a novel understanding of constitutional review is needed.

Riggs v. Palmer has become famous since Dworkin used it to show that legal positivism is defective. The debate over the merits of Dworkin's claims is still very lively. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the content of the statute at issue in Riggs was given by the counterfactual intention of the legislature. According to arguments from legislative intent, a judicial decision is justified if it is based on the lawmaker's intention. But can legislative intentions be determined counterfactually? More generally, what are the discursive commitments undertaken by a lawyer or a judge, in an exchange of legal reasons, when using this interpretive methodology? This paper addresses these issues considering, in particular, David Lewis's "resemblance" condition and "relevant similarity" between possible worlds in the evaluation of counterfactual statements. The analysis sheds some new light on the debate on theoretical disagreements and shows that Dworkin's conception of law as an argumentative practice is not necessarily at odds with legal positivism. It rather allows us to look at it under a better light.

The article focuses on the deference paid to experts by legislators and judges, highlighting a phenomenon hitherto not considered in the literature. I call this phenomenon “opacity of law”. In particular, the article distinguishes the opacity of legal provisions from the opacity of legal norms. A provision is opaque if it contains technical terms or expressions, incorporated into the text on the instructions of experts, that escape the understanding of the legislators. A norm is opaque, on the other hand, if its content is implicitly fixed by some experts in fact-finding, although that content is not understood by the judge who is called upon to apply the norm. When legal provisions or norms become opaque, epistemic deference to experts turns into semantic deference, and experts create new law in the sense that they establish the content of authoritative legal texts. Starting with two example from case law, the article analyses the origin of this phenomenon, and its pernicious effects. //

Il saggio focalizza l'attenzione sulla deferenza prestata dai legislatori e dalle corti nei confronti degli esperti, evidenziando un fenomeno fino ad oggi non considerato in letteratura. Chiamo questo fenomeno "opacità del diritto". In particolare, il saggio distingue l'opacità delle disposizioni dall'opacità delle norme. Una disposizione è opaca se contiene termini o espressioni tecniche, incorporate nel testo su indicazione degli esperti, che sfuggono alla comprensione dei legislatori. Una norma è opaca, invece, se il suo contenuto viene implicitamente fissato dagli esperti in sede probatoria, sebbene tale contenuto non sia compreso dal giudice che alla norma dà applicazione. Quando le disposizioni o le norme diventano opache, la deferenza epistemica nei confronti degli esperti si trasforma in una forma di deferenza semantica, e gli esperti creano diritto nel senso che determinano il contenuto dei testi normativi. A partire da due casi giurisprudenziali, il saggio analizza l'origine di questo fenomeno e i suoi effetti problematici.

Reasoning by default is a relevant aspect of everyday life that has traditionally attracted the attention of many fields of research, from psychology to the philosophy of logic, from economics to artificial intelligence. Also in the field of law, default reasoning is widely used by lawyers, judges and other legal decision-makers. In this paper, a philosopher of language (Carlo Penco) and a philosopher of law (Damiano Canale) attempt to explore some uses of default reasoning that are scarcely considered by legal theory. In particular, the dialogue dwells on the notion of literal meaning, witness testimony, and the problem of disagreement among experts in legal proceedings. The paper is intended as a sort of brain storming useful to identify new lines of research straddling philosophy of law, cognitive psychology and philosophy of language.

It is well known that experts' opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert's opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call 'the opacity of law'. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert' opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to factfinding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making.

When a legislature passes a law, it comes naturally to think that this is the law that the legislature intended to make. Yet, can institutional entities such as legislatures have intentions? In the light of the philosophical debate on collective intentionality, the essay explores the possibility of ascribing intentions to legislatures. Based on all this, the essay claims that (1) Individual legislators necessarily share a collective participatory intention when they legislate. (2) However, participatory intentions do not determine statutory contents. (3) When legal officials resort to legislative intent in legal interpretation, they actually make reference to a fictional entity within a collective game of make-believe. (4) Yet, legislative intent qua fictional entity serves important functions in current legal systems. It is the cornerstone of a set of argumentative frameworks that provide guidance to judicial interpretation, contribute to align individual expectations with regard to statutory contents, put constraints on how litigants and courts pursue their goals, help identifying the interpretive practice legal officials are engaged in. Furthermore, fictionalism calls attention to the fact that when judges interpret statuses according to legislative intent, they actually employ various interpretative frameworks that are grounded on concurrent principles and values. Choosing one doctrine of legislative intent over the others ultimately depends on normative grounds.

The problem of disagreement among expert witnesses is becoming increasingly relevant in the legal practice, as a result of the decisive role often played by expert knowledge in fact finding. Faced with disagreements of this kind, the judge is unable to competently evaluate the information provided by the experts and runs the risk of making epistemically arbitrary choices. The essay aims to contribute to the solution of this problem drawing on the epistemology of disagreement, a young and rapidly developing discipline that analyzes the effects of disagreement on the reliability of expert opinions. In particular, the essay distinguishes four kinds of disagreement among expert witnesses and critically examines the proposal to use the majority principle to address this problem. The essay then identifies the criteria that the judge should apply to evaluate the conflicting testimonies of the experts and the conditions under which an epistemic disagreement justifies the reasonable doubt of the judge with regard to the ascription of responsibility to the agent.

Il problema del disaccordo tra gli esperti chiamati a testimoniare nel processo sta assumendo una rilevanza sempre maggiore nella prassi giuridica, di riflesso al ruolo spesso determinante che le conoscenze di tipo specialistico svolgono in sede probatoria. Di fronte a disaccordi di questo tipo, il giudice non è in grado di valutare in modo competente le informazioni contrastanti fornite dagli esperti, esponendosi così al pericolo di compiere scelte epistemicamente arbitrarie. Il saggio si propone di contribuire alla soluzione di questo problema traendo spunto dall’epistemologia del disaccordo, una disciplina oggi in rapido rapido sviluppo che esamina gli effetti del disaccordo sull’affidabilità delle opinioni esperte. In particolare, il saggio distingue quattro tipi di disaccordo epistemico che possono sorgere nel processo ed esamina criticamente la proposta di ricorrere al principio di maggioranza per fornire ad essi una soluzione. Il saggio individua poi i criteri che il giudice dovrebbe adottare per valutare le testimonianze contrastanti degli esperti e le condizioni alle quali i disaccordi epistemici giustificano l’insorgere di un ragionevole dubbio con riguardo all’attribuibilità oggettiva o soggettiva del fatto all’agente.

Resumen: Este ensayo se enfoca críticamente en los aspectos meto-dológicos del libro Legalidad de Scott Shapiro. De hecho, el libro de Shapiro presenta varias tesis originales sobre la naturaleza del derecho y los principales problemas de la filosofía del derecho, pero también sobre cómo la filosofía del derecho puede descubrir la naturaleza del derecho. En este sentido, el método de investigación adoptado por Sha-piro puede considerarse como uno de los resultados más interesantes y desafiantes de su investigación. El ensayo está dividido en dos partes. La primera proporciona un análisis del enfoque filosófico de Shapiro; en particular, se centra en el recurso de Shapiro al vocabulario me-tafísico, el análisis conceptual, el razonamiento constructivo y la ex-plicación institucional del derecho. La segunda parte destaca algunos de los problemas que plantea este enfoque. En particular, el ensayo argumenta que (1) la teoría del derecho de la planificación no puede explicar la obligación legal; (2) la estrategia constructiva de Shapiro tie-ne un carácter recursivo que tiende a oscurecer la variedad de entidades legales; (3) la versión de análisis conceptual propuesta en Legalidad es semánticamente ciega y corre el riesgo de volver a leer en el mundo las características del lenguaje; (4) Shapiro supone que las entidades legales equivalen a un solo universo de hechos legales, mientras que las
normas, contratos, parlamentos, etc., reales no parecen tener el mismo
conjunto básico de propiedades y existir de la misma manera. Para dar
cuenta de esto, el ensayo describe una visión alternativa sobre la naturaleza del derecho basada en un enfoque pluralista de la ontología social.

This essay reply to the criticisms of my book "Conflitti pratici. Quando il diritto diventa immorale" raised by Alberto Andronico, Pierfrancesco Biasetti, Javier Ansuategui Roig, Eugenio Lecaldano, Ulderico Pomarici and Francesco Viola in "Etica&Politica", 20, 2018 (http://www2.units.it/etica/index.html). The essay focuses on the task of legal philosophy in teaching and in the public debate, the distinction between legal positivism and legal non-positivism, the relationship between metaethics and legal philosophy, the nature of practical conflicts, and the connection between rules and values.

Secondo la teoria conversazionale della comunicazione linguistica, la norma espressa da una disposizione giuridica consiste in ciò che il legislatore intendeva comunicare mediante il proferimento della disposizione in un contesto dato. Pertanto, qualora una norma risulti indeterminata, l’interprete deve risalire all’intenzione del legislatore per specificare ciò che la norma prevede. In questo saggio sostengo che la teoria conversazione della comunicazione non fornisce una spiegazione attendibile del funzionamento del linguaggio nel contesto giudiziale, e propongo una spiegazione alternativa dell’indeterminatezza delle norme, basata su una concezione inferenzialista del contenuto linguistico. In base a tale spiegazione, l'indeterminatezza delle norme dipende da una peculiare forma di disaccordo tra i partecipanti a uno scambio di ragioni in seno al processo, mentre l’intenzione del legislatore costituisce semplicemente uno degli strumenti argomentativi utilizzati negli ordinamenti democratici per legittimare l’attività interpretativa delle corti.

This paper focuses on the practice of making reference to foreign law in legal adjudication. On the one hand, this practice has received overwhelming attention from legal scholars in the last two decades under the headings of " judicial dialogue " , " judicial cross-fertilization " or " constitutional conversation " ; on the other hand, a systematic, theoretical picture of this practice is still lacking. The paper aims to bridge this gap by elucidating the structure of legal comparison in judicial decision-making from the point of view of the argumentation theory. To this purpose, the paper examines the various forms of comparative reasoning, identifies the set of their implicit premises and shows under what conditions referring to foreign law in legal adjudication is justified on its own grounds.

What is the best way to address the problem of combinatory vagueness in legal adjudication? According to a view which is often held by philosophers of language, courts must make reference to what the legislature intended to say. Intentional content makes up for the lack of determinacy of meaning and contextual content, and can be used to determine whether a combinatory vague norm applies to borderline cases. In this paper I argue that this view does not provide a convincing account of how legal language works since it does not take into consideration the specific characteristics of legislative intention and the institutional dimension of linguistic communication in law. I then put forward a different explanation of combinatory vagueness based on an inferentialist approach to semantics and pragmatics. In this account, combinatory vagueness is a feature of language which depends on a specific form of disagreement between the participants in an exchange of reasons. By looking at the linguistic interplay between parties and judge in a legal dispute, the paper shows how combinatory vagueness arises and how it is reduced by courts in order to settle borderline cases.

This paper focuses on the practice of making reference to foreign law in legal adjudication. On the one hand, this practice has received overwhelming attention from legal scholars in the last two decades under the headings of “judicial dialogue”, “judicial cross-fertilization” or “constitutional conversation”; on the other hand, a systematic, theoretical picture of this practice is still lacking. The paper aims to bridge this gap by elucidating the structure of legal comparison in judicial decision-making from the point of view of argumentation theory. To this end, the paper examines the various forms of comparative reasoning, identifies the set of their implicit premises and shows under what conditions referring to foreign law in legal adjudication is justified on its own grounds. This analysis will lead us to discuss the thesis according to which comparative reasoning by courts is changing the nature of law and the structure of contemporary legal systems.

“Preunderstanding” is the core of the theoretical framework developed by legal hermeneutics. Legal interpretation is necessary guided by the know-how, the presuppositions and the
attitudes of the interpreter. But if this is the case, how can we distinguish between a legitimate and a not legitimate preunderstanding, and also between a good and a bad interpretation? The paper tries to adress this question analyzing the structure of preunderstanding from the point of view of both legal hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics. The paper
argues, in particular, that the preunderstanding of the judge can be treated as legitimate if corresponding to the “real thing” (Sache selbst) regulated by the text. Such a criterion can be articulated methodologically by means of an inferentialist approach to conceptual content and legal process.

This paper focuses on the practice of making reference to foreign law in legal adjudication. On the one hand, this practice has received overwhelming attention from legal scholars in the last two decades under the headings of “judicial dialogue”, “judicial cross-fertilization” or “constitutional conversation”; on the other hand, a systematic, theoretical picture of this practice is still lacking. The paper aims to bridge this gap by elucidating the structure of legal comparison in judicial decision-making from the point of view of argumentation theory. To this purpose, the paper examines the various forms of comparative reasoning, identifies the set of their implicit premises and shows under what conditions referring to foreign law in legal adjudication is justified on its own grounds. This analysis will lead us to discuss the thesis according to which comparative reasoning by courts is changing the nature of law and the structure of contemporary legal systems.

Questo testo costituisce un capitolo del Manuale di filosofia del diritto, curato da Tommaso Gazzolo e Stafano Pietropaoli, in corso di realizzazione. Il capitolo ricostruisce una traiettoria eccentrica entro la parabola del giusnaturalismo moderno, quella rappresentata dal pensiero filosofico-giuridico di Leibniz e Wolff. In particolare viene evidenziato come il metodo scientifico moderno viene utilizzato da questi autori per salvaguardare la tradizione gius-romanistica e aristotelico-scolastica, emendandone i contenuti al fine di perfezionare il diritto del loro tempo. Per quanto le riflessioni di Leibniz e Wolff sul diritto naturale sia caduta ben presto in oblio presso i loro stessi contemporanei, esse gettarono alcuni semi che germoliarono nei secoli successivi nella cultura giuridica europea.  Dal momento che si tratta di un testo destinato agli studenti di Filosofia del diritto, qualsiasi suggerimento per migliorarne la chiarezza, la completezza di informazione e l'apparatico critico è benvenuto. Grazie.

A partire dal problema del disaccordo tra gli esperti e dei bias cognitivi che possono pregiudicare l'affidabilità dei loro pareri nel processo, l'articolo esamina criticamente le strategie processuali adottate nell'ordinamento giuridico australiano ("conclave of experts" e "concurrent evidence") per risolvere  questo problema.

The paper provides a theoretical framework for the analysis and evaluation of the disagreement between expert witnesses in evidentiary reasoning. The framework distinguishes four kinds of experts' disagreement and suggests a set of criteria of evaluation derived from the debate on the epistemology of disagreement.

Il saggio indaga, sotto il profilo filosofico, le somiglianze tra "Davanti alla Legge" di Kafka e la ricostruzione delle ricerche di Foucault proposta da Deleuze nelle lezioni universitarie del 1986. La lettura incrociata di questi due testi consente di tematizzare in modo originale alcuni snodi chiave dell'opera di questi autori. Il saggio è stato scritto in occasione del ciclo seminariale di diritto e letteratura dal titolo "Leggendo e rileggendo Kafka", organizzato dall'Università di Catania, Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, nell'autunno del 2021.

A partire dai saggi contenuti nel primo numero di "Diacronìa: Rivista di storia della filosofia del diritto", l'articolo propone alcune considerazioni critiche con riguardo all'uso della nozione di transizione nella ricerca storica in campo giuridico e politico.

Although legal customs are nowadays a subsidiary source of law, the concept of custom is implicitly used by legal scholars to account for quasi-juridical phenomena such as the role of precedents in civil law systems, the use of foreign law by courts, the constitutional conventions, or the non-binding agreements, rules and principles of soft law. The same concepts has been also employed in legal philosophy to characterize the social practice at the foundation of law, such in the case of Hart’s theory of the rule of recognition. In this essay I first consider the problems that the traditional accounts of customary law gives rise to. Then I put forward an original account of customary law based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical inquiry into the concept of repetition. According to the account proposed in this essay, legal custom is an interstitial source of law which modifies the content and the conditions of application of positive law. This account also provides some new insights with regard to the contemporary debate on the rule of recognition and the normativity of law.

It is today commonplace to claim that state borders are undergoing change. In the age of globalisation borders have acquired new characteristics that do not fit in with the traditional understanding of them. Many believe that this signifies a break away from the modern conception of state borders, which saw them as institutional lines that set the spatial extension of state sovereignty.
This viewpoint can be challenged, however. On the one hand, the importance of state borders in international politics has been increasing over the last few years. On the other hand, the idea that globalisation is changing the very nature of state borders needs closer scrutiny. As a matter of fact, legal scholarship has paid little attention to the concept of border in the last few decades, and this is one of the reasons for the lack of clarity regarding the contemporary transformation of state borders.
This paper tries to contribute to fill this gap by looking at the phenomenon of border walls, i.e. the construction of impenetrable barriers to safeguard state territory. Does the proliferation of border walls around the world simply indicate a revival of the territorial sovereignty of the states, or is it a phenomenon with quite different characteristics?
To answer this question I proceed as follows. I first consider the debate on the transformation of state borders in the literature on globalisation. I then looks at the distinctive features of modern borders from a historical and theoretical point of view. This helps clarify whether the features of border walls make it necessary to update the traditional concept of public border. The paper shows that it is not possible to provide an univocal answer to this question and distinguishes four kinds of border walls having different institutional characteristics.