The project

Our research is aimed at laying down a theoretical framework for a public institutional ethos grounded on the Rule of Law (hereinafter “ROL”). The purpose of the project can be summed up in three goals. The first one is to advance in the understanding of the current process of implementation of the ROL by focusing on the aptitudes, capacities, skills and virtues requested to the participants in the practices of a ROL system (both legal practitioners and citizens, even though our proposal will be focused on the former). Building on the review of the vast literature on the ROL and the international and related domestic legal documents, the research intends to test the hypothesis that the ROL shall be grounded on, and even identified with, an ‘institutional ethos’ consisting of ‘institutional virtues’. The definition of its constituent elements will result also from the structured interaction with some key players of the ROL system, such as judges, lawyers, and public servants as indicated in the third goal. 

The second goal is to articulate the essential elements of the institutional ethos proper of the ROL, drawing upon (i) the resources provided by a Virtue Ethics approach, which emphasizes moral character and virtue over duties and rules, and which includes and revitalizes also the writings of classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Montesquieu; (ii) the more recent acquisition of the Virtue Jurisprudence, which advocates that legal theory shall execute the aretaic turn proper of the ethics of virtues, and (iii) some recent trends in professional ethics of legal practitioners in Italy. 

The third goal of the research, which has an experimental nature, is to co-produce and promote – in the context of a sort of contamination lab with judges, lawyers and public servants – a list of institutional virtues (those strictly linked to the ROL), and three related short curricula, to be tested with students in the schools of law, and to be proposed as experimental tools for lifelong learning activities for legal practitioners. Such an approach is intended as a meaningful contribution to renewing and supplementing lifelong learning activities and professional ethics of judges, lawyers and public servants, countering two currently dominant approaches: the one that identifies professional ethics with codes of conducts to be strictly followed and implemented through disciplinary sanctions; the other that conflates professional ethics with general ethics, paving the way to an excess of moralism, or at least to a lack of moral specification of the ethics of legal professions, whose heart is the legal ideal of ROL.