Posted by The Law School
6 June 2024When the Italian Fascist government of Benito Mussolini began to turn itself into a dictatorial regime, one of its first steps was to weaponize criminal law. Through a series of measures in 1925-26, justified in terms of a necessary response to conditions of emergency, the regime introduced new laws to crush political opposition.
These measures are the focus of Professor Stephen Skinner‘s current research. Stephen is Professor of Comparative Legal History and Legal Theory at the University of Exeter. He was invited to give two research presentations at the Legal History Institute of the University of Ghent in Belgium at the end of May.
The first presentation was entitled ‘Fascist Justice and Repressing Dissent: Subversion Trials before the Italian Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State, 1927-1928’, which he presented on 29 May at a departmental research seminar. This paper outlined how Special Tribunal judgments in subversion cases during the first two years of the Tribunal’s operation indicate the nature and scope of subversive activities and the particularities of ‘fascist justice’.
The second presentation was entitled ‘Narratives of Emergency and Criminal Law on Subversive Associations in Fascist and Republican Italy’, which he presented on 31 May. This was as part of a two-day workshop on ‘Avatars of Crisis: Exploring Emergency at the Nexus between Law, History and Theory’. This paper discussed the origins and post-war survival of a specific provision of the 1930 Penal Code, Article 270, which criminalized political associations, and how narrative theory can be used to reveal new perspectives on its history, its post-fascist longevity and its interconnections with various forms of emergency.
Read more about Stephen’s research on our website.