Unit 1. The unit of Palermo will work on three lines, informed by three innovative directions of expertise. One is the controversial status and extension of ROL, relevant for translating it into an institutional ethos and in a personal virtuous project. The more convincing lists of ROL requirements will be confronted with the legal virtues (Trujillo 2013). In particular, the unit will look at the proposals that already consider the ROL as the heart of the ethics of legal professions (Waldron 2006), to further elaborate those proposals in connection with external partners such as the Edinburg group, where Amaya & Michelon are working on virtues and the practice of law (see the recent collective issue Trujillo 2022). The unit will deepen the practical dimensions and the virtues connected to respecting law (Edmundson 2006), fidelity (Postema 2014), and loyalty. The second line of research will compare the status and role of public servants and employees of international institutions from the point of view of the virtues requested by their engagement and commitment to the legal systems where they operate. At the domestic level, this kind of approach will be complemented by the analysis of the impact of ANAC anticorruption policies in preventing inappropriate professional conducts. As it is well known, the anticorruption shift of professional ethics for public servants leads to the preference for codes of conducts instead of codes of ethics, but codes of ethics could play an important role at least in the case of managerial roles performing their leadership in the Public administration. The third line will start from the so-called “clean hands operation” led by the Milan public prosecutor office in 1992, which produced the collapse of the parties system of that time in the span of two years. After thirty years, the public debate on the role and accountability of prosecutors has changed dramatically. Public prosecutors have lost their image of “defenders of the legal order” and some of them have tried to enter the political arena, with unequal results. Palermo’s unit will study the problem of the relationship between prosecutors and the media, as well as the political role of legal professionals. Our hypothesis is that no legal norms, aimed at enhancing trust towards officers’ impartiality, can be effective without officers’ self restraint in exercising their individual rights as citizens.
Unit 2. The unit of Bari will focus on three directions of inquiry: the first two are purely theoretical and concern the area of the ethics of virtues, while the third direction takes the theoretical inquiry closer to real life. In the first direction the unit will draw a taxonomy of the main virtues that are usually employed in different areas of life, distinguishing between ‘intellectual, moral, civic and performance virtues’, as defined in the Jubilee Report ‘Framework for Character Education’ (https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/527/character-education/framework). Bari’s unit shall, then, concentrate on the intellectual virtues necessary to perform legal roles – e.g. autonomy; critical thinking; curiosity; judgement; reasoning; reflection; resourcefulness. In particular, the unit will privilege a reflection over the virtue of ‘reasonableness’ taken as the contemporary heir of the Aristotelian phronesis (Mangini 2017, 2018, 2020) as a necessary element in the reasoning of all legal practitioners but especially important for decision-makers such as the judges. The unit shall evaluate the tasks performed by this virtue both for lawyers and for judges, trying to emphasize points of overlapping and points of distinction (see ‘Codigo Modelo de Etica Judicial’ for Latin America: https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/CIEJ/Codigo-Iberoamericano-de-Etica-Judicial/). In the second direction the unit shall address the other virtues pertaining to character that are necessary in the performance of legal roles, i.e. moral virtues such as compassion, courage, gratitude, honesty, humility, integrity, justice, respect and performance virtues such as confidence, determination, motivation, perseverance, resilience, teamwork. The established cooperation between the Bari unit and the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues will support further collaboration when deemed necessary to better orient the inquiry. In the third direction, the unit shall move on the path of the relation between law and cinema, considering the way legal roles, with their character and emotions, are pictured in some movies. Rather than being uninfluential, we believe that this aspect of ‘virtue ethics’ affects the way legal roles and the ROL are perceived by the public opinion. In this inquiry we shall avail of the collaboration of well-known experts in the field (Rivaya 2012).
Unit 3. The unit of Enna Kore will focus on two issues. The first one is the relation between virtue and emotion. It will draw upon the writings of classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero, and upon the more contemporary literature of moral sentimentalists and neuroscience and it will also interface with judicial office, such as the Conseil of State, in order to acquire not solely deontological codes but also internal circular letters addressing the code of conducts of administrative justices. By assuming the importance of emotional intelligence in legal reasoning and interpretation, the unit will explore the role of empathy in judging and provide an emotional reading of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis (Corso 2014 e 2018), as well as test the possibility of incorporating these conclusions in the judicial office’s regulation. The second issue concerns the roles of temperance, moderation and coordination in the action of high public officials. Drawing upon the insights of Cicero, Maimonides (Corso-Nicolini Coen 2021), Montaigne and Montesquieu on temperance and moderation in the exercise of a public role, the Kore unit intends to highlight the importance of the principle of coordination among powers, which will be interpreted as to complement the principle of separation of powers and offices. The unit will in particular review the literature and the practice of coordination between the constitutional court and the legislative power, as described in the 2019 Report of the Activity of the Italian Constitutional Court (Cartabia 2020).