Biography
Lorenzo is Sessional Lecturer at Imperial College, where he teaches Conflict, Crime and Justice and Law and Ethics for Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Law at Kingston University, but he has been recently appointed Senior Lecturer in Law at Coventry University, where he’ll take service in January.
Lorenzo’s main research interest is the globalisation of crime and justice, with a particular focus on the role of science and technology in the development of a global system of criminal justice and on transnational and systemic corruption. His research on corruption led him to found the Integrity Research Group, an international interdisciplinary research network on corruption and anti-corruption. Lorenzo has authored many publications, including the award-winning book “The Measures of Prevention of International Terrorism and Criminal Trafficking” (Padua, 2012).
Prior to his appointment at Coventry University, Lorenzo has been a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Padua. For his research, he visited many institutions both in the UK, such as Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast, and overseas, such as Columbia University (New York), Fordham University (New York), Florida International University (Miami), and Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi (Istanbul). He is a Fellow of the Westminster Abbey Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Abstract
As the human society gets increasingly global, the traditional systems of law and political power, centred as they are around the obsolete dogma of national sovereignty, are becoming inadequate to their purposes. Traditional legal categories and principles are simply not applicable to many of the challenges of globalisation. One would expect, as the most rational and reasonable reaction to the deterritorialisation and the interconnectedness of many social phenomena, a gradual and possibly well-planned globalisation of the legal and political responses. But the globalised world is a world that lost any faith in reason and the responses we are witnessing are far from being rational and reasonable. In the attempt to maintain and re-legitimate their power, national governments, also supported by scholars, take advantage of fears and irrationality of the people, to manipulate and distort even the most established and advanced acquisitions of our legal civilisation. The legalisation and proceduralisation of torture to prevent terrorism are but one of the many suggested aberrations. Instead of a healthy deconstruction and reconstruction of law and politics in order to fit the human needs they should serve, we have a disfigurement of law into injustice and ineffectiveness.
Admittedly, calling for the establishment of a system of global law, as many do, might be easy to say, but very difficult to do. While being a potential source of impressive richness, the considerable diversity in political and religious ideology that characterises the contemporary world still prevents a global agreement on some common values, and therefore some basic principles upon which to found a global system of law. Widespread irrationality, poverty and poor education, which in turn might cause xenophoby, suspect, hatred, discrimination, and violence, contribute to exacerbating this difficulty. Even when States manage to agree on some common legal principles, such as fundamental human rights, their actual implementation is still far from being realised, due to the most different interests and ideologies that affect their local interpretation and enforcement or that determine their overt rejection or violation.
If global law needs to be a break from the inadequate obsolete traditions, then perhaps the solution is in thinking differently than how we have been accostumed to do for centuries. In a globalising world, the common values of humanity cannot be identified, as we use to do in the past, in idelogical systems, be they political or religious, as these will be always subjective and debatable. Instead, they should be founded on the most objective grounds possible. Science and the laws of nature as we know them provide humanity with the most objective, inasmuch as demonstrable and verifiable through objective methodologies, knowledge of the way the world works and of the facts of life we need to address with a future system of global law. Some scientist has already suggested that from the description of reality provided by the laws of nature we can possibly derive a system of ethics. My hypothesis is that our scientific knowledge can do more than that, as it can also point the direction towards a universal set of values from which we can derive not only ethical indications, but proper universal legal principles. Indirectly, the establishment of our scientific knowledge of the world as the foundation of global law would represent a major contribution to restoring our faith in reason and science, against the dangers of pseudo-science and ignorance, also at the highest political levels, that are affecting our age. Thus, the objectivity of scientific knowledge and its methods might become a remedy to the legal and ideological Babel that is currently hindering the development of human society at large. This will require, needless to say, a radical rethinking of law as we know it and it might lead to getting rid of some dogmatic schemes that have dominated law for centuries and that we are blindly following as sacred idols, without even having the courage of putting them in discussion: amongst this, the very same idea of citizenship and sovereignty.
This seminar will be a preliminary exploration of the possible scientific foundations of the future global law. It will focus particularly on the relations between science and law and on the possible impact of science both on the forms of law (how the law should be) and on its contents (what the law should say).