Emergencia y garantías (en el pensamiento jurídico de Luigi Ferrajoli)

Abstract: Along with Spain and United Kingdom, Italy has suffered a terrible period of political violence between 1970 and 1982 with hundreds of killings. In this paper I analyse the origins of Luigi FERRAJOLI’s theory of legal guarantee and his criticisms to Italian legislation against terrorism of that time. Therefore, I shed light on three different understanding of such a theory and I offer a review of that legislation that he labelled as «the subsystem of exception ».Moreover I will apply this conception of «special» criminal law to two famous trials against militants of a group of the extreme left. According to FERRAJOLI, these trials have been an instance of the paradigm of political judgements against internal enemies, in which blatant violations of the ideal of fairness and equal protection under law have occurred. Finally I will present some critical remarks about FERRAJOLI’s thesis on the conceptual dichotomy between emergency legislation and the Rule of law. I will argue that this dichotomy is useful as a tool for criticising legalistic ideologies of criminal law, but it lies on a misleading premise: that there are clear borders between emergency and ordinary criminal policies, but often, this is not the case.