The research aims at three different goals:
- To advance in the understanding of the current process of implementation of the Rule of law by focusing on the aptitudes, capacities, skills and virtues requested to the participants in the practices of a Rule of law system (both legal practitioners and citizens, even though our proposal will be focused on the former)
- To articulate the essential elements of the institutional ethos proper of the Rule of law, 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.
- 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 Rule of law), 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.