Santi Romano was born in Palermo, Sicily on January 31, 1875. His origins had a notable impact on his legal training, as Palermo was the cradle of a host of renewed legal studies that changed once and for all the way of approaching public law in Italy. His teacher, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, was both a leading statesman and an innovator of the notion and practice of public and administrative law.
This article juxtaposes Santi Romano’s legal-pluralist paradigm with other approaches to
illustrate why his theory contributes to contemporary debates in the international academic
environment. I first identify the differences between Romano and his contemporaries. In
this regard, it is my claim that his theory stands out from the rest as he was able to advocate a
pluralist conception of law without dissolving the legal into the social. I then put Romano’s
theory to the test of more recent literature on the issue with a view to arguing that it still
Legal pluralism, as a way of thinking about law, is the seemingly straightforward idea that there is a range of normative orders, which are independent from the state and can be properly described as legal without committing any conceptual mistake. Without giving a full survey of the long and varied history of legal pluralism theory, this article will discuss some central moments in that history.
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