ABSTRACT
In the history of legal thought, legal institutionalism is one of the new approaches that emerged, together with legal realism, in the first half of the 20th century in reaction to the hegemony of legal positivism and natural law. The advanced section reconstructs the contribution of four continental authors, identified as the torchbearers of this approach: Maurice Hauriou, Santi Romano, Costantino Mortati, and the work of Carl Schmitt in his last phase (post Constitutional Theory). The advanced section zooms in on themes at the core of legal institutionalism: the concept of institution, the nature of the relation between society and the legal order, the concrete or material dimension of legal analysis. Finally, the section shows that the main legacy of legal institutionalism ought to be seen not in the institutional theory of law formulated by Weinberger and MacCormick, but in the developments concerning systems theory and legal pluralism.
