Rodolfo Sacco

This article investigates how the neuroscientific studies can become useful to unveil the “mute” dimension of law and determine its “appearance”. It is not a coincidence that a sensible anthropologist such as Roderick MacDonald imagined law as an iceberg where its emerged peak, visible above the water, represents the written law, while the most substantial submerged part represents all the implicit and inferential aspects of the law. Looking at the historical reality, the image is far from being defined. After broadly rethinking some of Rodolfo Sacco's reflections about the existence of "mute law", here the following considerations attempt to highlight the importance that neurosciences could have in forming the theoretical basis of the sources of law by better defining the physiology of the regulatory production processes.

The present work aims at critically analyzing the conception of mute law, as proposed by Rodolfo Sacco. According to his provocative idea, there are acts and legal norms fully/completely unconnected to any semiotic procedure. The analysis is indeed centered on supposed silent acts and aims at demonstrating that the legal acts must be officially recognized through accepted semiotic codes; the above also applies when occurring through material behavior not perceived from other subject. Useful insights derived from the above considerations can be exploited to critically examine the conception of law Sacco adopted and to better focus the theory of tacit elements of the law.