Santi Romano and L'ordinamento giuridico: The Relevance of a Forgotten Masterpiece for Contemporary International, Transnational and Global Legal Relations

This article has two main purposes. The first is to provide an introduction to Santi Romano's seminal work L'ordinamento giuridico, first published in 1917, in which the author develops the main tenets of his thought, namely institutionalism and pluralism. The first part of this essay accordingly provides an outline of Romano's theories; this account is intended to be sufficiently robust to benefit an English-speaking readership for which there is still no translated version of L'ordinamento giuridico available. Embedded within the overview of Romano's theories is a discussion of the criticism they have attracted and the influence they had on Romano's contemporaries, and to that extent this first part constitutes a contribution to the history of ideas. The second purpose is to assess the relevance of Romano's theories for the current study of international, transnational and global law. It is argued that Romano's particular conception of law as an institution can be helpful in the current debate on the unity and systematisation of international law, whereas his reflections on the plurality of legal orders contained early kernels of insight for present-day research on the fragmentation of international law and the rise of atypical global governance regimes.