Alcuni appunti sugli aspetti istituzionali della cosiddetta globalizzazione

Legally speaking, the globalisation of the economy reflects essentially on the law of property and the law of contract. This incidence is apparently divergent. While the effective safeguarding of real property rights are weakening, contract law is gaining strength as the central institution of the international market. In actual fact, the effect is the same, but is taking place on rather different planes. In both cases, the discipline in question is losing its anchorage in national legal orders. But while, in the case of real property, this loss of anchorage concerns national rules and institutions, in the case of contract law it concerns national rules and mindsets. This latter effect is particularly pronounced in those systems that cultivated the legend of the omnipotence of statute law in the past, relegating the principle of contractual freedom to the margins of legal reasoning, and that, as a consequence, now have difficulty understanding what is happening. In these cases, of which modern Italian legal experience is a good example, the development of markets requires a difficult change in mindset, on pain of marginalisation.

Antonio Gambaro, Alcuni appunti sugli aspetti istituzionali della cosiddetta globalizzazione in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 2-3/2005, pp , DOI: