Southern Europe (Italy, Iberian Peninsula, France)

In this chapter, law is taken as a set of related communicative systems. The idea of legal communicative systems or spheres emphasizes the coexistence of a plurality of laws according to factors of differentiation other than global entities, mostly related to a nation state pre-comprehension, like ‘races’ or ‘nations’, ‘kingdoms’. What would matter would be the setting of shared dispositives of ‘telling (uncovering, creating) law’. This approach problematizes established assumptions, like the separation between ‘romanistic’ and ‘germanistic’ laws, the all-inclusiveness of ‘national’ or state laws, the unity of learned law. Conversely, it supports emergent research interests on: the artificiality and complexity of ‘nations’, the porosity of ‘Germanic’ law to ‘foreign’ influences, the impact of materialities of legal communication over form and even content, the coexistence in a same territory of different legal communities, separated by communicative divides.