Legal Acts, Images, Institutions (LAII)

LAII (Legal Acts, Images, Institutions) focuses on the legal and
philosophical analysis of the form of legal and contractual documents in light of the challenges that stem both from the new social, international and technological landscape we see today and from the new theoretical perspectives concerning legal design and social ontology. The acquisition of awareness of the performative and institutional character of legal acts and the role played by norms (and, in particular, by constitutive rules) in their creation and regulation has radically transformed the paradigms of knowledge of legal acts, pushing us to rethink and redesign existing boundaries. LAII’s group will adopt a new multidisciplinary approach to  investigate the traditional theme of the legal form. This innovative methodological approach combines legal studies with philosophical disciplines (philosophy of law, philosophy of language, social philosophy, epistemology) that have recently provided new theoretical tools for the investigation of legal acts. Furthermore, we will also study the form of the legal act from a civil law perspective, as a proactive tool aimed at preventing the emergence of disputes, clarifying the contractual program. Moreover, the adoption of legal design techniques could favour the integration and legal interaction between people belonging to heterogeneous linguistic and cultural contexts. LAII will focus particularly on the new contract design techniques that are gradually spreading internationally. The emergence of new contractual forms reopens the debate of the conventionality of legal acts and the principle of freedom of forms (contractual declarations are valid even when they are not evidenced in writing, unless mandatory rules of any applicable domestic law provide otherwise). The emerging innovation in the field of contract design opens a new perspective of research on the relationship between the form of the legal act and its validity.
LAII aims to broaden the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the form of legal acts by building a new conceptual apparatus through collaboration between scholars from different scientific fields.
LAII also aims to translate the new knowledge acquired from the "law
in books" to the "law in action". This will provide a real-world
contribution to legal practice. More specifically, LAII aims to identify
potential future legal engineering around the idea of the form of legal
acts and to explore possible innovation in terms of the form of the legal act made possible by new social and technological structures, especially in light of the new perspective offered by legal design. An example is exploiting the inherent potential of graphic images (e.g. comic contracts).