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Dr. Angela Condello

University of Roma Tre

Angela CondelloCurriculum Vitae

Angela Condello was born in Siracusa (Italy) in 1984. She studied law at the University of Torino and at the University of Roma Tre, where she focused on international and comparative law, and obtained a doctorate from the same university with a thesis entitled “Ana-logica”.

Since 2009, Angela Condello has been working as a research assistant for the chair of philosophy and sociology of law at the University of Roma Tre (Prof. Dr. Eligio Resta). In 2013 she worked at the Human Rights Committee of the Italian Senate of the Republic as an assistant of the President of the Commission, Prof. Luigi Manconi.

Angela Condello’s research and teaching focus on legal philosophy. She currently co-teaches a course at the Arcadia College of Italian Studies in Rome on the evolution of the paradigm of human rights from both a philosophical and historical perspective (together with Dr. Stefania Gialdroni, a legal historian and in collaboration with the law faculty of the University Roma Tre) and co-organized and co-teaches the Law and the Humanities course in Roma Tre (together with Prof. Dr. Emanuele Conte and Dr. Stefania Gialdroni). Since 2008, Angela Condello has been teaching philosophy of law at the International University Uninettuno. She is currently also involved in an international research project entitled ENTRE A JURISDIÇÃO E A MEDIAÇÃO: O PAPEL POLÍTICO/SOCIOLÓGICO DO TERCEIRO NO TRATAMENTO DOS CONFLITOS, based in Brasil.

Dr. Condello has done research and presentations at several universities and research centers, among which the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law (Heidelberg), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Australian National University in Canberra. Recently, she completed a scholarship programat the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law (Heidelberg). 

From January until December 2014, she was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.

Research Project

Exemplary Forms, Paradigmatic Forms: a Comparative Study of Types of Normativity between Law, Language and Culture

Law cannot be described solely by a formalized structure of logical form: it is, instead, constantly challenged by the redefinition of the relations between legal (but not only) thought and reality. This is the core thesis of my PhD dissertation and the theoretical basis of my current project.

Here, I am going to study the relationship(s) between legal normativity and other types of normativity. In order to do so, I intend to analyze the peculiar nature of legal normativity, by examining in the spaces of intersection – and the modes of interaction – between legal discourse and the discourse of social sciences, in particular by looking at the peculiar normativity of examples and paradigms.

Multiformity, Categorization, and the Normativity of the Law

Exemplary and paradigmatic forms are, for different reasons and in different ways, elements that constitute the hermeneutic parameters of a given context. What is it that specifies the characteristic force of these forms of generalization in the law? By starting from an interdisciplinary (but thematically coherent) reconstruction of the genealogy of “example” and “paradigm” in human thought - logic, rhetoric and political discourse, epistemology and phenomenology -, I will draw the conceptual and semantic frame of the book project. Exemplary forms are declined in many different types in legal culture: from the more evident, like jurisprudential precedents in Common Law and Civil Law systems, to more “discrete” but nevertheless relevant forms such as types, models, standards, and everything that stands instead of a norm ordinarily formulated.

Exemplarity, moreover, brings together the ordinary (cases that are already described by a norm, which provides for them) and the extreme (cases that challenge the normative order because they are not yet provided for by law). The normativity of the law, quite obviously, is constantly confronted with frictions between these two dimensions (extreme and ordinary, exceptional and regulated): legal norms are in fact forms that can be reproduced, because they are general and abstract. But this characteristic also constitutes a critical aspect of legal normativity, whose rationality cannot be reduced to a mere a priori scheme, universal and atemporal. The rationality of legal normativity is, instead, always influenced by the historical context. 

Exemplary Forms and paradigmatic Forms: Between Legal Theory and Practice

I start from an analysis of concrete cases drawn by different terrains. I consider how exemplars and paradigms interact with questions of juridical normativity and legal pluralism, when new and weaker forms of normativity emerge. This aspect of the research will be developed starting from the historical perspective: the category of “normativity”, e.g. what concerns modes of governance, needs a comprehensive understanding that links together the practices of legal pluralism and the philosophical remarks on exempla and paradigms. A core thesis is that exemplarity is widespread in the law as well as in the social sciences, as proved by the definition of Idealtypusthat Max Weber gave in the Methodology of the Social Sciences: "(…) an ideal type is formed by the one‐sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct”.

The contemporary is the space of multiple narrations: a large part of the research will thus be consecrated to different “paradigmatic” phenomena in other semantic fields, such as for instance psychoanalysis (the Jungian archetypes, defined as “ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious”), linguistics (prototypes) and rhetoric – among others. A large part will be also dedicated to the connections between the law and Kant’s aesthetics, Peirce’s semiotics and Cassirer’s remarks on symbolic forms. This research project helps contribute to look towards a theory of multiplicities that can explain the plurality of practices from the perspective of theory. The aim is to show how cultural models themselves become paradigms that cross legal discourse and other cultural discourses, in particular with respect to the peculiar juridical ars combinatoria of structuring the multiversum into a universum (and vice versa) on the background.

Publications

  • Human Rights Between Nature and Convention, in: RegNet (Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University, Canberra) working papers series (SSRN), forthcoming 2014.
  • Relevantly similar, analogous, paradigmatic. Analogical thinking and the structure of normative orders, in: C. Smith & H.J.R. Kaptein (eds.), Analogy and Exemplary Reasoning in Legal Discourse (Ashgate 2014, forthcoming) - French translation forthcoming in Jurisprudence Révue Critique (2014).
  • Diritto al lavoro e al reddito, in: Rapporto Biennale sui diritti in Italia, (eds.) L. Manconi, S. Anastasia, forthcoming 2014.
  • Diritti dei minori, in: Rapporto Biennale sui diritti in Italia, (eds.) L. Manconi, S. Anastasia, forthcoming 2014.
  • Polisemie della mediazione: alcune riflessioni a partire dalla radice med-, in F. Spengler, ACESSO À JUSTIÇA, JURISDIÇÃO E MEDIAÇÃO, organização de Fabiana Marion Spengler e Theobaldo Spengler Neto – Curitiba: Multideia, 2013, (pp. 161-178).
  • Analogie: Théorie et pratique du raisonnement judiciaire, in: M. Boudot & M. Faure-Abbad (eds.), Mélanges en hommage à Jean Beauchard, LGDJ, coll. Droit et Sciences Sociales, Faculté de droit de Poitiers, June 2013, (pp. 441-454).
  • Analogia ed esemplarità nel discorso giuridico, in: Politica del diritto, XLIII, n. 2-3, June-September 2012, Il Mulino, November 2012, (pp. 421- 440).
  • Immigrazione e asilo in Italia nelle raccomandazioni degli organismi internazionali per i diritti umani, in: Larticolo Tre. Rapporto sullo stato dei diritti in Italia. Lampedusa non è un’isola. Profughi e migranti alle porte dell’Italia, (eds.) L. Manconi and S. Anastasia, 2012 (pp. 330-366).
  • Per esempio, in: Revista do Direito N° 35 Jan-June 2011, available on http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/direito/issue/view/109, (pp. 37-54).