An Intellectual Trajectory in the Age of Antiformalism. Gény and the Rise of the Law of Society.

Abstract

The letters that Gény wrote to Saleilles between 1892 and 1912 are a precious treasure, an inexhaustible mine of ideas, suggestions, confirmations. They betray the sensivity, the fragilities, the torments of the man, before the substance and the technical style of the lawyer. Gény and Saleilles are first of all human beings, overwhelmed by facts and things, inclined to the emotions; they are lawyers immersed in the reality of their age, with their views planted in the material of the economic and social facts. Thanks to his perspective, based on the rediscovered centrality of society and economy, Gény outlined a social and dynamic conception of law; suggested a system of the sources of law much more rich, complex and articulate than the monistic one supported by the legalistic culture introduced by the Napoleonic Code; believed in an antiformalistic conception of law, built around the creative power of the interpreter; redefined the topics and the contents of the private law, which were not anymore – or at least not only – the ones of the Napoleonic Code, but the ones typical of an industrial society.