Early Italian Statutes: Dedicated to Guido Calabresi

Michael Widener

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Honoring the Hon. Guido Calabresi (Law ’58)

The Yale Law School has marked the 50th anniversary of the Hon. Guido Calabresi’s graduation by acquiring a significant collection of 60 early Italian law books for the Law Library’s Rare Book Collection from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The Lillian Goldman Law Library is pleased to join with the Law School by dedicating this exhibit of Italian statutes to Judge Calabresi.

Judge Calabresi is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. He was born in Milan, Italy and graduated at the top of the Yale Law School Class of 1958. He also earned a B.S., summa cum laude, from Yale College in 1953, a B.A. degree with First Class Honors from Magdalene College, Oxford University, in 1955, and an M.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University in 1959. He joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1959 and served as Dean from 1985 to 1994, when he was appointed Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton (Law ‘73).

“Every schoolboy knows that the Italian universities, and especially Bologna, were the great centers of nonreligious law throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Indeed, there may well have been no break at all between the ancient Roman law schools in Bologna and the University of Bologna. What is not generally known, however, is how modern law was in Italy at that time, at least in contrast to what was happening in England.” — Guido Calabresi, “Two Functions of Formalism: In Memory of Guido Tedeschi,” 67 University of Chicago Law Review 479, 481 (2000).

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER

Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Illustration: Title page from a compilation of statutes for Judge Calabresi’s hometown, Milan, Constitutiones dominii mediolanensis (4th ed.; Novara, 1597).


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