Farewell to Natalino Irti, a leading figure in the legal world and a key player during the privatisation era
He was 90 years old. He leaves behind three legacies: in legal theory, in his practice as a lawyer, and in the broader realm of writing and cultural debate
by Paolo Bricco
With the death, at the age of ninety, of Natalino Irti, we have lost one of our “greats” – to use the term by which, even in the mid-20th century, a century to which he fully belonged, the great masters were still referred to. Irti leaves behind three legacies: in legal theory, in the practice of law, and in the broader realm of writing and cultural debate, which the readers of our newspaper will well remember thanks to his refined and influential Sunday columns.
His family was from Avezzano. His father Aurelio, born in 1900, was a criminal lawyer with a D’Annunzio-inspired background, a volunteer at the age of 17 in the First World War, a nationalist and a fascist. His mother Maria, born in 1908, was a middle-class girl who read novels and played the piano. He recalled Irti to Il Sole-24 Ore regarding his university years at La Sapienza in Rome, following his childhood and adolescence in Abruzzo: “I used to attend the Mondo conferences. It was a stern and aloof environment. Mario Pannunzio and Ernesto Rossi were not very approachable. Mario Ferrara was the friendliest. That experience shaped me for life: in liberal socialism as a third political and cultural way, and in public service, when I would go on to make my contribution within the governing bodies of IRI.”
Irti was awarded a lectureship in civil law at the age of 28 and won the competition for a professorship at 32. A student of Emilio Betti, he taught in Sassari (where his colleagues included Valerio Onida, Gustavo Zagrebelsky and Francesco Cossiga), Parma, Perugia and Turin: “I spent three years there. It was a cultural environment of the utmost authority. Giovanni Conso and Norberto Bobbio were there,” he recalled. In 1977, he was appointed to the Faculty of Law at La Sapienza, where he taught private law institutions, civil law and general theory of law, establishing a veritable school of thought that would endure after his passing.
His legacy is, first and foremost, cultural. The Treccani encyclopaedia states: “As early as in his book *The Age of Decodification* (1979) Irti analysed the phenomenology of the progressive erosion of the civil code, increasingly marginalised by the emergence of genuine ‘group statutes’, the result of a ‘legislative polycentrism’ that has enabled the proliferation of special laws dictated by the interests of various actors (social partners, centres of economic and political power) that shape civil society”.
Irti, with a non-nihilistic realism, highlights the decline of any transcendent foundation of law (be it theological, metaphysical or natural). Individual legal norms are the expression of the rational will of groups wielding economic, political and technological power. Hence, in the extreme form of globalisation, the law takes on the character of pure artificiality. The technical nature of the law asserts itself within the general context established, in turn, by the power relations that are established from time to time.
