Abstract

Vittorio Emanuele Orlando is still an influential author in Italian Public Law, although hardly noticed as legal scholar outside his home country. A whole wealth of literature tries mainly to discern his contribution in terms of a history of ideas and insists on the many inspirations he brought into the legal debate at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as on his capacity to transmit ideas to many disciples with numerous prolongations into the present time. Interestingly, he is celebrated as a master of legal method. In the present contribution, the author takes the opposite view. According to him, Orlando was confronted with and attracted by a plurality of heterogenous approaches which he tried to combine, but failed to organise in a logically coherent manner. What he successfully transmitted was thus not a sense of method in legal scholarship, but the legitimation of logically inconsistent reasoning.