Abstract

The author focuses on some Ascarelli's legal essays published along the Fifties. This essay briefly discusses that law can be understood only as a part of the socio-political background, and that law and history are strongly connected. If so, to understand law means understand history. In this perspective, legal technicalities are non valid per se, but are a technical language by which to express the richness of values that exist within society. The jurist is not only a technician of the law, because she is the interpret of the political claims people try to affirm within society. Ascarelli's perspective is very interesting as regard to the modern concept of the law as the realm of hermeneutics: judges, jurists, and legislators are part of the law as an institution. Law is a historical by-product, and so the process of understanding of the law is entirely part of the social sciences. Therefore, the jurist is a social scientist.