La dialettica tra regole e principi. Una approssimazione al ragionamento giuridico

The debate on legal principles shows no sign of abating, among legal theorists and legal scholars alike. Apart from a few milestones — specifically, that principle-based argumentation is now a widespread practice among jurists — on almost all fronts the discussion has, for more than fifty years, been completely open: on the nature of principles, on the possibility of considering them a unitary and coherent category, on their identification, on the manner of their application, on their differences from other types of norms, on the very possibility of considering them as legal norms. In this essay, I intend to focus on the relations between rules and principles at the operational level: I am interested in showing that, in legal reasoning, rules and principles operate neither in watertight compartments nor in distinctly different modes, as certain vulgatae widely circulating in contemporary legal culture would have it.