Ricerc@Sapienza

This articles centres on the persistent intercourse between social order and its undoing.
By exploring three types of legal institutionalism which will be dubbed “compositional”
(Santi Romano), “performative” (Carl Schmitt) and “generative” (Widar Cesarini Sforza),
we will debate the proposals these types advocate on how to make order out of the innate
pluralism of the social and its inherent tendency to overproduce forms of normativity.
While we will mainly be concerned with the differences between these versions of legal

This essay foregrounds the relevance of Italian jurist Santi Romano’s theorizing to today’s political and legal debates on the relation between state and non-state laws. As Romano’s classic book L’ordinamento giuridico (1917–1918) has finally been translated into English, the Anglophone readership can take stock of one of the most enlightening contributions to institutional thinking in the last centuries.