Benvenuti and the New Dams in Law

Feliciano Benvenuti made a significant contribution towards the new role of jurists in the second half of the twentieth century. His scholarly path was guided by the idea of democratic reform, which was necessary to implement the republican Constitution (i.e. to look to the past to build new limits safeguarding individual and collective freedoms). Having posited that individual freedom is the value to be safeguarded, the key concepts of his scholarly contribution were those of function, legal order, community, autonomy and participation. The article aims to identify the three main directions of Ben- venuti’s thought: the first regards the general theory of law and legal metho- dology, and, in particular, the notion of law and the role of the jurist; the second, that would once have been defined as the theory of the State (staatslehre), analyses the studies on the deconstruction of the State and the emergence of European law, on the one hand, and regional autonomy, on the other; the third, concerning administrative law more properly, sets the notion of «function» at the core of the system and is based on the equal and participatory role played by citizens in the administrative procedure and process.