ANTROPOLOGIA GIURIDICA E DIRITTO COMPARATO

Degree course: 
Corso di Long single cycle degree (5 years) in Law - Como
Academic year when starting the degree: 
2022/2023
Year: 
3
Academic year in which the course will be held: 
2024/2025
Course type: 
Supplementary compulsory subjects
Language: 
Italian
Credits: 
8
Period: 
Second semester
Standard lectures hours: 
50
Detail of lecture’s hours: 
Lesson (50 hours)
Requirements: 

A good knowledge of the fundamental institutes of private and public law is required to attend the course.

Final Examination: 
Orale

The examination is oral.
For non-attending students, specific readings will be made available.
For law students only, a textbook on the discipline of the family in today's world will be made available

Assessment: 
Voto Finale

The course is part of the initiatives of the UNESCO Chair: "Gender Equality and Women's Rights in the Multicultural Society" and aims to provide students with an introduction to the role of women in the family and society through the tools of legal anthropology and comparative law in order to better understand the role of law in today's multicultural society.
The leitmotif is the analysis of gender equality and difference within the family and in different social and regulatory spheres. With this in mind, the course aims to provide students with a reference framework regarding the major issues of equality, difference and discrimination, both from a cultural and a legal point of view, with particular reference to women and gender.
After having identified the phenomena that have led to the cultural construction of gender differences from an anthropological point of view, the course aims to provide students with the cultural background to understand what the role of law has been in consolidating these differences over the course of the various historical eras, so what its role in removing them may be today.
On the basis of this approach, the course aims to provide the evolutionary framework of family law in Italy and other European countries, including France and England, and non-European countries, including the United States, China and India, taking into account the role of women and the new familiy models recognised in the course of time

In the first part, the course offers the student an introduction to legal anthropology, as a discipline aimed at studying the role of law (norms, practices, symbologies, facts with legal characteristics) in antiquity, as well as in distant populations characterised by an oral culture and 'simple' social organisation.
The tools of legal anthropology will in particular be applied to the study of the phenomena that led to the division of roles between men and women. Different family forms will be analysed. Certain practices, such as genital mutilation, will be studied from an anthropological perspective, highlighting their relevance today in certain cultural contexts and the reactions of law in certain legal systems.
In a second part, the study of the family and gender difference will then be addressed from a comparative perspective, with regard to the evolution of women's rights in different European contexts (Italy, France, Great Britain), as well as in some other non-European legal systems of reference. In particular, the legal system of the United States will be analysed, where the presence of specific problems regarding race and gender have generated interesting theories regarding the so-called 'intersectionality', a term used to describe the overlapping (or 'intersection') of different social identities and the relative possible particular discriminations. The study of the US legal system will be tackled together with Prof. Tanya Hernandez, visiting professor at Fordham University in New York. With regard to Asian legal systems, the legal systems of China and India will be examined.
Finally, the student will be introduced to the different family models present today, in which norms, institutions and traditions circulate with migration flows and in which international law develops forms of protection for women at supranational level in the family and society.

Part I: Introduction to Legal Anthropology
Legal anthropology as a tool to delve into the surface of law in order to trace in it the cultural and/or symbolic foundations that a given community considers indispensable for its own destiny 2. Birth of homo erectus and differences between genders 3. The cultural creation of gender 4. Family types in antiquity

Part II - The evolution of women's rights and family law in the European framework
1. The evolution of the family and women's rights in France: Olympe de Gouges and the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens (1793) 2. The Code civil and the status of women in the patriarchal family 3. The Code Pénal and the relevance of adultery 4. Adultery between law and literature: Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" and Zola's "Thèrese Raquin" 5. The first conquests and the evolution of customs and fashion 6. The introduction of women's suffrage and the constitution of 1946 7. First reform of matrimonial regimes and abolition of marital authorisation 8. The family law reforms of the 1970s: abolition of the notion of 'chef de la famille', equal treatment of children born out of wedlock and in wedlock 9. The PACS law: Pacte civil de solidarité 10.The " mariage pour tous " in the 2013 law 11. The surname of the wife and the family
The evolution of women's rights in Italy from the 1865 code to the advent of the First World War: the discipline of the patriarchal family 2. The relevance of adultery between law and literature: "Senso" by Camillo Boito 3. Fascism and the new concept of "masculinity" and "femininity" in Italy: The family unit as the fundamental cell of the fascist state: the Italian code of 1942 4. The introduction of universal suffrage and the 1948 Constitution and the principle of equality in the family 5. The reforms of the 1960s and 1970s: towards a concept of substantive equality 6. The 1975 reform of family law 7. Law 76/2016. Same-sex civil unions 8. Civil union and marriage 9. De facto cohabitations 10. The surname of the wife and the family

1. The evolution of women's rights in Great Britain: Blackstone's theories and the status of the married woman 2. the situation of women under the Marriage Act of 1753 3. Mary Wollstonecraft and The Rights of Women (1792) 4. The reforms of the Victorian era: the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the abolition of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and the principle of the indissolubility of marriage; the Custody of Infants Act (1873), the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878) and the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 and 1882 5. The contribution of Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill 6. The situation of women in England in the mirror of literature: Daniel Dafoe (Moll Flanders, 1722) Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1817) and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, 1847) 7. The suffragette movement, the right to vote and the achievements of the 20th century 8. The evolution of the family in the 20th century: the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act of 2013 9. The wife and family surname

Part III - The American Woman: When Discrimination is Against Gender and Race
1.Gender and race discrimination 2. The emancipation of the black population. 3. The Civil War and the new amendments to the Constitution 4. Plessy v. Ferguson and the Equal but separate principle 5. Rollins v. Alabama: when the others were us 6. Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and racial desegregation 7. Angela Davis and the activism of African Americans for women 8. Black women emancipation: the literary case of Toni Morrison 9. New investigative tools to identify the phenomena of discrimination (with Prof. Tanya Hernandez) 10. The discipline of the family in the United States: from its colonial origins to the different approaches existing today in the different states 11. The new modern family and the interventions of the American Supreme Court

Part IV- The evolution of women's rights in some non-European contexts: the case of China a

Convenzionale

The course is based on lectures, in which documentaries and films will also be taken into consideration to highlight the realities present in other regulatory contexts. the teaching material consists of slides (power point) that will be made available to students on e-learning

As the course syllabus for law students is 8 credits, there will be a monographic part on current family law