TEACHING PARLIAMENTARY LAW, TODAY, IN LIGHT OF SANTI ROMANO’S MONOGRAPH

Abstract

Although the thesis supported in it is now clearly recessive, the re-reading of Santi Romano’s monograph of 1906 dedicated to the legal nature of parliamentary rules of procedure offers a series of useful reflections on the method of study and teaching, today, of parliamentary law. Santi Romano, in fact, succeeds in identifying what were – and for the most part still remain – the main methodological and conceptual nodes, relating above all to the system of sources of law, of a discipline that precisely in that timeframe began to arise. In particular, reference is made to the weight of unwritten sources of law, to the question of internal or external effects of the parliamentary rules of procedure (both in the major and minor ones); or to problems relating to the identifiability and incisiveness of forms of judicial control that adopt parliamentary rules of procedure as parameters or as objects. The contribution is articulated around these nodes, obviously also in light of the several innovations that have occurred in the meantime, up to the most recent years, in order precisely to show the persistent usefulness of dedicating specific and in-depth attention to these issues in the courses of parliamentary law held today.