PIERO CALAMANDREI, UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT

Abstract

Piero Calamandrei, renowned Italian jurist, professor and politician, was also noted for his intellectual distance from the fascist regime since the 1920s. We follow his trajectory from the beginning of the conflict to the first years after Italy’s liberation. After Mussolini’s fall, in 1943, on July 25, Calamandrei is appointed president of the University of Florence, but is soon forced to step down due to the German occupation. During this period, he began to mature the ideas expressed in the Notes on the concept of legality, in which he renounced the theses espoused in his enthusiastic review of The certainty of law by Lopez de Oñate. Beginning with his famous introduction to Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments, we see an inflection towards a legality understood in a substantial sense, whose precondition is freedom. He envisions a constitutional legality, built through the critique of the “legislator’s omnipotence”, as a barrier to totalitarianism. Calamandrei, thus, trailblazed through routes later followed by others (Paolo Barile, Giorgio La Pira and Giovanni Miele) that would profoundly mark Italian post-war constitutionalism. In 1944, in his liberated native Florence, Calamandrei resumed his duties as president of the university and led it through the difficult period of reparations to the victims of fascism in academe and purging of its most intolerable adherents. In late 1947, already as a member of the Italian constituent assembly, he announces his desire to step down from his position in the university’s administration.