The Creativity of the Jurist: Giovanni Pascuzzi’s latest book

Giovanni Pascuzzi‘s latest book, “La creatività del giurista” [The Jurist’s Creativity], has been published few weeks ago by Zanichelli of Bologna. See the table of contents (in Italian)

Here a translation from the back cover:

Why a Nobel prize was never assigned to a jurist? We expect new discoveries, inventions, new ideas that can improve the well being of the mankind from scholars in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, economics. In the field of law, instead, innovation is always seen with a certain degree of suspicion. Nobody expects that a jurist could show a high or low degree of creativity. In the words of Piero Calamandrei: “jurists can’t afford the luxury of fantasy”.

But at a closer look, changes are a common features of the law of the western legal tradition. History abounds of examples of legal innovations driven by legislators, courts, lawyers, and scholars. Behind these innovations the learned hand of the jurist is at work.

This book is not about the legal techniques employed to change the law (for instance, legislative reforms). It looks, instead, to the cognitive techniques of innovation that jurists employ. Pointing out to selected examples of the most significant legal changes that took place in the last decades in different fields of the law, this book tries to single out and describe the cognitive techniques employed when the jurist is called to give an answer to old and new problems.

We use creativity skills in the legal field, or strategies to encourage the inception of new ideas that should be taught and learned; they make clear that a jurist can never stop to question the consequences of the legal solution proposed.

When to the creativity of the jurist will be acknowledged the fundamental role that it already plays in practice, the idea of assigning a Nobel in the field of law will eventually follow naturally.