• Vita

    Ferdinando Mazzarella studied Law at the Universities of Palermo and Aberdeen. In 1996 he earned his degree cum laude with a thesis on “The Rights in rem in the Middle Ages. Ideas for an investigation into Property throughout History”, being awarded the prize “Edoardo Ruffini” from the “Accademia dei Lincei” for the best Italian thesis in Legal History. In 2001 he obtained his doctorate “Legal History” at the University of Milano “Statale”. In the same period, he received several research grants from various institutions, including the Italian Ministry of University for a research in Barcelona “Archivo de la Corona de Aragon” (1998), the “Italian Center for Studies on the Early Middle Ages” (1999) and the University of Palermo for a research on “Trademarks and consumer protection from Bartholus de Saxoferrato to the present day” (2002). Since the latter research, his interests focused on the history of European Commercial and Civil Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries. In 2010 he obtained the National qualification as Associate Professor in Naples University SOB and in 2017 the National habilitation for tenured Full Professorship in Legal History. He was a fellow with scholarships at Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main in 2009, 2012 and 2018, and a guest lecturer in several Universities, including Madrid UAM, Madrid “Carlos III” and Münster WWU. From 2017 to 2019 he was one of the principal investigators of the research project on “Civil Law in the post-bourgeois Era: 100 Years of Private Social Law in Germany, France and Italy”, financed by the “Italian-German Center for the European Dialogue Villa Vigoni”. From 2019 he is Full Professor of Legal History at the University of Palermo.

  • Research Project

    Political unity, legal variety? Codification and Contract Law in Fascism and National Socialism

    The political alliance between Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany implied a close cooperation in all fields of culture, including law. From 1937, Italian and German jurists met in a bilateral committee and worked together officially in order to direct legislation and jurisprudence towards the “nationalsozialistische und faschistische Weltanschauung”. On this basis, investigating into single branches of law, legal historiography has often highlighted several cultural and ideological convergences between the two totalitarianisms, such as nationalism, antisemitism, the fight against liberalism and individualism. This project aims to compare the approaches of Germany and Italy on codification and contract law in the light of their ideology, in order to ascertain whether the “programmatic” harmony in the field of law was cultural and authentic or motivated by formal and political reasons. Unity or variety? Uniformity or diversity? Is overcoming liberal individualism enough to talk about a common private law? Is collaboration on new forms of codification sufficient to hypothesize the same conception of the sources of law? Is sharing anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-Bolshevik premises enough to assume the same legal ideology? To answer these and further questions, it is essential to run a comparative research on the foundations of the two totalitarian systems, which brings together ideology, politics, law and economics. This methodology could provide a solid framework to understand whether there was only one totalitarian private law or if there were in fact many variants.

  • Selected Publications

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, The Difficult History of the Limited Liability Company in Italy, in: Lohenig, Martin/Moszynska, Anna (Hrsg.): Reception of the Limited Liability Company (GmbH), Wien 2023, 137–161.

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, Per una preistoria del Progetto italo-francese di Codice delle obbligazioni e dei contratti. Dalla Scuola sociale alla socializzazione del diritto privato, in: Deroussin, David/ Löhnig, Martin/ Mazzarella, Ferdinando (Hrsg.): Bürgerliches Recht im nachbürgerlichen Zeitalter – 100 Jahre Soziales Privatrecht in Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien, Bd. I, Vom Liberalen zum Sozialen Privatrecht? Der französisch-italienische Obligationenrechts-Entwurf von 1927, Frankfurt a. M. 2022, 143–189.

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), in: Löhnig, Martin/ Wagner, Stephan (Hrsg.): Das ADHGB von 1861 als gemeinsames Obligationenrecht in Mitteleuropa, Tübingen 2018, 305–337.

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, Un diritto per l’Europa industriale. Cultura giuridica ed economia dalla Rivoluzione francese al Secondo Dopoguerra, Mailand 2016.

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, Dialoghi a distanza in tema di socialità e storicità del diritto. Italia, Francia e Germania tra fine Ottocento e primo Novecento, in: Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno 44 (2015), 381–424.

    Mazzarella, Ferdinando, Nel segno dei tempi. Marchi persone e cose dalla corporazione medievale all’impresa globale, Mailand 2005.