German Influence on Italian Jurists’ Perception of the British Constitutional Model in the late Nineteenth Century

In Great Britain, the Magna Carta was regarded as the guarantor of parliamentary sovereignty for centuries. During the nineteenth century the Charter continued to be interpreted in law schools, particularly through William Blackstone’s 1759 edition. By the mid-nineteenth century, both politicians and lawyers proceeded with a revision of the law, and provided the first Statute Laws Revision Act of 1856. Two further acts followed in 1861 and 1863, repealing hundreds of obsolete laws; subsequent legislation abrogated much of the Magna Carta and, by the 1880s, yet more chapters of the Charter were revoked. In the rest of Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, eminent Continental scholars were authoritative voices regarding the interpretation of the English juridical system. By examining historical, legal and political-theoretical aspects of the Continental, particularly the German, reception of the English concept of law, the aim of this work is to contribute to a wider understanding of European constitutionalism of the time since the nineteenth century can be considered a ‘constitutional era’. Various aspects of constitutional history both within and outside continental Europe are examined from a comparative, juridical and historical perspective. In Italy, German studies on English constitutional and parliamentary history have been translated and commented on. This paper is a working hypothesis about the influence, or the rejection of, the legal system in place across the Channel. The essays by some distinguished German jurists interpreting the English institutional inheritance have been translated into Italian. These translations and, particularly, the comments thereon, reflect the road taken by Italian legal thinking to reach a Constitutional model and to gain an insight into what lessons Germans drew from the English legacy in order to form their own doctrinal opinion.