Beyond the statute law: an introduction

The volume, collecting the papers of a seminar (in June 2010, an Interlabo of the GERN: Groupe Européen de Recherche sur les Normativités), proposes an exemplifying path directed to showing certain critical knots of the Italian experience considered in a historical and theoretical perspective. The juridical project of modernity cannot do without the concept of statute law and its ideological centrality. Still beyond this façade, there are yet other issues. So beyond the statute law intends to raise the question of the co-presence and integration in penal systems between the formal theory of the sources and the actual existence of «grey areas» which contributed to rule (and do they still rule?), for certain aspects, strategic sectors. The principle of legality, often represented as a mono-bloc, must face, since its very beginning, different operative levels which subject the “liberal” codes and the devices of derogation and exception to tension, ending in restraining rights and guarantees. Beyond the statute law identifies also the procedure that brings the statute law towards hybrid tools, in the border area between statute law and administration, between the “shine” and publicity of the statute law and the opaqueness of regulatory and administrative acts. An area of interest – little studied, at least in Italy – is precisely that of circulars, instructions, notes, accepted practices, etc. Therefore, sources of regulations which should define the most minute details of the execution or regulate only administrative operations, contribute, instead, to defining, in a direct way, law policies in strategic sectors of the criminal law system