Università Roma Tre

The course of General theory of law intends to illustrate the lawyer’s activity, with the premise that it is a communicative experience. Obscurity and vagueness of norms are the most serious problems within the ambit of the law. However, this problem is common to all the communicative processes and can be overcome by integrating the message (here the norms) in a specific context, that provides the information necessary to understand the text. Within the context of law, more specific problems arise. On one side, the “text” is formed by the set of all norms, therefore it has disproportionate dimensions. On the other side, the context must be analysed with methods directed to simplicity and intelligibility. Jurists have been overcoming these obstacles resorting to several instruments:
Systematic analysis of the set of rules;
Hermeneutic traditions;
Legal logic;
Economic analysis of law;
The reconstruction of practical scenarios;
Commutative, distributive, retributive justice principles;
Resort to common sense;
And so on.