Last page of the Union of Utrecht, 1579, Nationaal Archief (US-PD) This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume on The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn pointed to five major sources that helped drive the American revolutionaries…
“Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1758 (US-PD-Art). This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The issue of the cultural foundations of the Founding Fathers and of American constitutionalism in general is, perhaps, more apparent than real and, in any case,…
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, visited the migrant hotspot in Lampedusam, Italy © European Union, 2026 (CC BY 4.0). I would like to read Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall from the perspective of Mediterranean Europe, and more specifically from Italy. My aim is to ask what happens when the…
The Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0). Democratic systems in the contemporary world are often interpreted through the paradigm of secularization, understood as “the emergence of a civilization in which the holders of sacred knowledge no longer possess a monopoly over spiritual production, and in which civil society, emancipated…
The world premiere of Puccini’s “Suor Angelica”, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, 1918 by White Photo Studio. This paper summarizes and translates into English the chapter Suor Angelica: il suicidio tra teologia e diritto, from the book Puccini in Law: Raccolta di studi in occasione dell’anno pucciniano, edited by Domenico Di Micco, Mario Riberi, and…
Reformist Prison Theology: God The Slave, God The Prisoner George Walters-Sleyon This essay is an adapted excerpt from the twelve chapter of George Walters-Sleyon’s book,The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume Two: Chattel Slavery to Penal Slavery in the US and the UK, 1865 to Post-1970 Realities (Cascade Books, 2025). You can view an excerpt from Volume…
Christianity and the Making of Irish Law: Violence, Virtue and ReasonDavid H. McIlroy (ed.) The following essay introduces the new book, Christianity and the Making of Irish Law, Violence, Virtue, and Reason (Routledge, 2026) by the volume’s editor, David H. McIlroy. The volume is now available for purchase via Routledge. Ireland, “the Isle of Saints”,…
Carlo III di Borbone visiting the Pope Benedetto XIV in the coffee-house of the Quirinale, Rome (US-PD). As the eighteenth century unfolded, theories aimed at limiting the Roman Catholic Church’s authority, shaped over the previous centuries and influenced by humanist and natural law thinking, started to really take hold in the religious policies of some…
Lady Justice at The Palace of Justice, Rome, Italy by Jebulon (CC0 1.0) Against the backdrop of the affirmation of the Modern State and the birth of national legal systems, the hundred years from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century represent a period full of changes for Europe also in the legal field. As…
European Union Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels by Estonian Foreign Ministry (CC BY 2.0) This article is part of our series on Law, Religion, and Immigration. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. The 2024 European Union Migration Pact is a significant new set of policies aimed at unifying the EU’s approach to…