This article discusses the philosophy of legal judgment that Alessio Lo Giudice has developed in his recent book Il dramma del giudizio. Lo Giudice's main contribution is a forceful defense of the human nature of legal judgment, something that he links to the notion of a 'leap'. This article considers what this leap might entail and asks whether it can accommodate the nature of legal judgment. For this purpose, it will juxtapose the figure of Judge Tatting as sketched by Lon Fuller with the work of the Dutch legal theorist Paul Scholten. Finally, the article asks what the reality of anthropogenic climate change might entail for the role of the judge and Lo Giudice's view on judgment.
The aim of this essay is to address three issues in relation to the problem of judgement: that of technique, that of fraternity, and that of the necessary relationality in the pursuit of "an expectation of justice". These themes are present in Alessio Lo Giudice's book, Il dramma del giudizio, with which I will be in constant dialogue. Through this confrontation, I will try to live up to the hope expressed by the author himself of stimulating further reflection on the themes developed in the volume. In this way, I will attempt to contribute to the consolidation of what Alessio Lo Giudice defines as a "radically human concept of law", a definition that I believe is the keystone of the entire volume.
The Drama of Judgment invites a reconsideration of the fundamental concepts underpinning the judicial experience. It challenges both the mechanistic conception of logical judgment and the notion of arbitrary subjectivism, instead situating the act of judgment within an intersubjective space. This rethinking is accompanied by a renewal of language, imbuing the qualificative terms of judgment with new semantic nuances - more positive, more trustful. This contribution proposes an interpretation of the text through the technique of word cloud analysis, exploring the author's innovative ideas and suggesting that judgment, beyond being a drama, is fundamentally nourished by human relationships, by individuals who act, communicate, and judge. The reflections developed here offer a framework for rereading Lo Giudice's work, highlighting how, in many instances, it provides compelling insights for a rhetorical perspective on law.
This paper discusses the aporias of judgment by analyzing Alessio Lo Giudice's recent book "The Tragedy of Judgment". These aporias consist in the fact that the judge is a human being judging another - which means he is never perfectly impartial -, in the lack of a universal notion of justice, and in the leap over the uncertainties of imputed events. Lo Giudice employs Hannah Arendt's appropriation of the Kantian reflective judgment to grasp the features of juridical judgment. This contribution further delves into the aporia of the personality of judgment by analyzing its contraries: "nobody can judge" with Arendt and "nobody's judgment" with Kafka. Thereby the enormous risks of impersonal judgment will be exposed.
In his essay Il dramma del giudizio (Mimesis, 2023), Alessio Lo Giudice offers a meditation on the act of judging and thus on law itself. He poses a salvific act of resistance against the technocratic temptation to evacuate judgement as a necessary step and expression of the legal process. On the contrary, the author reaffirms that there is no law without judgment and no judgment without drama. To face this drama, he proposes a third way between cynicism and angelism, through "judgmental sensitivity" (sensibilit & agrave; giudicante), which brings together reason and sensitivity, commitment and impartiality.
