Italy: The Liber Paradisus — A Vision of Good Governance

In this chapter it is argued that the “first document” in the Italian history in which “fundamental rights” have been affirmed is an arbitration award issued by the City of Bologna in 1256 – then complemented by some statutes in 1257, 1282 and 1304 – disposing the liberation in the whole territory of the town of slaves and serfs belonging to local landlords and bonded de iure or de facto to the masters and their land. The 1256 document was known as Liber Paradisus (the Heaven Book). The task was to identify, in the complex Italian history, a legal document that – at least prima facie – could be the homologue of the modern declarations of rights that have marked the evolution of state constitutionalism, and – more recently – of international law. The idea underneath is that it is possible and meaningful to trace retrospectively a sort of evolutionary lineage that somehow connects contemporary legal manifestations of the principles of legality, rule of law, democracy and human rights – in all their complex and at times controversial and even paradoxical features – to documents issued in the past centuries, in completely different socio-political contexts, that nevertheless contained the genetic print of present-day fundamental rights instruments. Is it possible to find a point in history in which some socio-political circumstances generally associated with the enactment of fundamental rights instruments at domestic or international level, were reunited, leading to the formulation of a normative act that enshrined something that, in that very moment, had the value of what nowadays we call a fundamental rights declaration or the declaration of a fundamental right? This has been the programme of the research. The selection of historical precedents to modern declarations of rights tells us something about the history of fundamental rights, but even more about one’s notion of what fundamental rights are today.