Mauro Cappelletti

Mauro Cappelletti (1927–2004) was an Italian jurist. He received his Doctorate in Law from the University of Florence, Italy, and was a Professor of Law at that same institution as well as at Stanford University Law School. Additionally, he was Chairman of the Law School at the European University Institute, Florence.

Professor Cappelletti was on the International Advisory Board of the Institute of Foreign and Comparative Law at the University of South Africa. He co-directed, with Professors Joseph Weiler and Monica Seccombe, an international research project on "Methods, Tools and Potential for European Legal Integration in Light of the American Federal Experience," sponsored by the Ford Foundation and European University Institute. Lastly, he also co-directed the Access to Justice project at EUI with Earl Johnson, Jr. in the late 1970s.

For nearly thirty five years, Mauro Cappelletti was essentially concerned about fundamental issues like the orality principle, the fundamental guarantees of the proceedings and their social dimension, access to justice either by means of participation or by the protection of the so-called diffuse interests, alternative ways of guardianship and coexistential justice based on conciliation ways, the judge's role and his responsibility, not to mention, of course, the issue of ideology.

Another important domain of Mauro Cappelletti's investigations were related to social dimension awareness of the proceedings, which he named copernic revolution, because it broke the traditional approach, leaving room for the procedural experts to turn their attention from law as a rule to law in its effective role in the concrete world, and thus focus the procedure in the light of the users' necessities.

His sociological view of the proceedings, inherited from Piero Calamandrei, the shared experience of the civil law and the common law made him a privileged observer of the great conflicts of value of the 20th Century, and most of all, an insuperable reformer in the studies of procedural law.

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