Remarks on Gioja, Tarello, and the Scientific Work of Internal Legal Culture

Towards a Possible Fusion between the Buenos Aires School and the Genoa School

Abstract

This article reconstructs and connects Ambrosio L. Gioja’s and Giovanni Tarello’s accounts of legal knowledge to demonstrate the complementarity between the Buenos Aires and Genoa analytical traditions. Gioja distinguishes between pre-scientific law, constituted through a community’s interpretation and evaluation of enacted legal materials, and scientific law, produced by legal scholars through their conceptual and systematic reconstruction. Tarello, by contrast, distinguishes between external and internal legal culture, focusing on the actors, practices, and cultural operations involved in constructing the law in force. The article revises Gioja’s claim that pre-scientific recognition necessarily requires a positive evaluation of legal norms. Legal recognition may coexist with negative evaluations, although it presupposes a minimum threshold of diffuse acceptance of the community’s working constitution. On this basis, pre-scientific law is understood both as the recognitional subset of the opinions produced by external legal culture and as the raw material upon which internal legal culture operates. Combining conceptual inclusion with genetic correlation makes it possible to outline a “GT Model” aimed at explaining the production, stability, and possible collapse of legal knowledge and positive legal systems. The proposed synthesis also restores the analytical relevance of both authors and supports the existence of an early intellectual affinity between the Buenos Aires and Genoa schools.