Abstract

The paper purports to present the theory of legal science (meta-jurisprudence) of Nicolò Lipari. It proceeds through three steps. The first step casts light on three varieties of metajurisprudential inquiries: descriptive, prescriptive, and auxiliary. The second step provides a reconstruction of Nicolò Lipari’s metajurisprudence, emphasizing its being a prescriptive, jurist-oriented, both bottom-up (from the standpoint of the problems considered) and top-down (from the standpoint of the solutions offered) enterprise. In so doing, it focusses on the three ideal duties Lipari proposes jurists to abide by: namely, the duty of endorsing a realistic picture of law and legal experience; the duty of rejecting legislative monism; the duty of subscribing to a radical form of constitutional pluralism, informed by the supreme constitutional value of the equal dignity of every human being. The third, and last, step raises two questions. On the one hand, which is the place, if any, of legal certainty (the certainty of fundamental rights) within a flexible conception of the meaning of constitutional provisions. On the other hand, up to which point, if any, the jurist endorsing constitutional pluralism should accommodate the supreme value of equal personal dignity to the claims of wild, inegalitarian, radical economic liberalism and anarcho-capitalism