Abstract

The author takes the recent provocation of Luigi Mariucci, on the state of the field of Italian labour law academic community, as starting point to analyse the real roots of the assumed crisis. The thesis is that the labour law as academic subject is, on the whole, in good health. Recent signs tend to put the labour and the need of a new model of regulation, in the middle of scientific reflection. Rough materials for a new phase of researching on labour law field, really innovative, are on the table. The social complexity, the globalisation of markets on one side, and the tendency, paradoxically not in contradiction, towards the localisation of labour relations on the other, must be faced with new and more sophisticated means of analysis. While it should be necessary a new era of studies and analysis, that can be carried out only in the natural estate, that is, the university, we witness a sort of "diaspora" of the academic "ceto" from the university towards an active and definitive engagement in active politics, or towards the market of freelance lawyers. This produces an impoverishment of the Italian academic labour law schools and a gradual, but unstoppable, process of bewilderment and disaffection of new generations of scholars.