Emilio Betti was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 jurist

Jurist

A jurist or jurisconsult is a professional who studies, develops, applies, or otherwise deals with the law. The term is widely used in American English, but in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries it has only historical and specialist usage...

, Roman Law

Roman law

Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...

 scholar, philosopher and theologian. He is best known for his contributions to hermeneutics, part of a broad interest in interpretation. As a legal theorist, Betti is close to interpretivism.

Betti's intellectual support of fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 between the end of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 and the beginning of the 1920ss led him to be arrested in 1944, in Camerino. Betti remained in prison for about a month, as decided by the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale. In August 1945, Betti was presented to court and absolved of every accusation.

His political choices, anyway, have not diminished the value and importance of his work. Between many other things, Betti was one of the members of the drafting commission for the Italian civil code

Civil code

A civil code is a systematic collection of laws designed to comprehensively deal with the core areas of private law. A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure...

 of 1942.

Betti is perhaps best known for his work in hermeneutics. He took issue with the hermeneutic views of Hans George Gadamer and argued that interpreters should attempt to reconstruct the author's intentions. His work influenced the work of E. D. Hirsch, the chief English-language spokesman for authorial intention. However, his influence in English has been limited by the lack of translations of his hermeneutic work.

Major works

Betti was a prolific writer. This is just a small part of his works:

• Sulla opposizione dell'exceptio sull'actio e sulla concorrenza tra loro (1913).
• La vendicatio romana primitiva e il suo svolgimento storico nel diritto privato e nel processo (1915).
• L'antitesi storica tra iudicare (pronuntiatio) e damnare (condemnatio) nello svolgimento del processo romano (1915).
• Studii sulla litis aestimatio del processo civile romano: I Pavia (1915), III (Camerino, 1919).
• Sul valore dogmatico della categoria contahere in giuristi proculiani e sabiniani (1916).
• La restaurazione sullana e il suo esito (Contributo allo studio della crisi della costituzione repubblicana in Roma) (1916).
• La struttura dell'obbligazione romana e il problema della sua genesi (1919).
• Il concetto della obbligazione costruito dal punto di vista dell'azione (1920).
• Trattato dei limiti soggettivi della cosa giudicata in diritto romano (1922).
• La tradizione nel diritto romano classico e giustinianeo (1924–25).
• Esercitazioni romanistiche su casi pratici: I, anormalità del negozio giuridico (1930).
• Diritto romano: parte generale (1935).
• Teoria generale del negozio giuridico (1943).
• Teoria generale delle obbligazioni (1953–1955).
• Teoria generale della interpretazione (1955–1960).
• Teoria delle obbligazioni in diritto romano (1956).
• Teoria generale della interpretazione (1955–1960).
• Attualità di una teoria generale dell'interpretazione (1967).

Book on Betti

• Ciocchetti, Mario (1998). Emilio Betti, Giureconsulto e umanista. Belforte del Chienti.