Successfully masterminded, as lawyer and an activist, the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to endorse Professor Mattei’s scheme to recognize water as a common.

Activist Work

International Academy of Comparative Law : Member

European Law Institute : Fellow

Global Jurist (Journal) : Founding Editor

Common Core of European Private Law (Journal) : General Editor

International University College of Turin : Academic Coordinator

Diapositives versus Movies – The Inner Dynamics of the Law and Its Comparative Account

The Evil Technology Hypothesis: A Deep Ecological Reading of International Law

Comparative International Law

The Common Core Approach to the European Private Law

Making the Other Path Efficient: Economic Analysis and Tort Law in Less Developed Countries

Plunder examines the dark side of the Rule of Law and explores how it has been used as a powerful political weapon by Western countries in order to legitimize plunder – the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones.   Challenges traditionally held beliefs in the sanctity of the Rule of Law by exposing its dark side Examines the Rule of Law's relationship with 'plunder' – the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones – in the service of Western cultural and economic domination Provides global examples of plunder: of oil in Iraq; of ideas in the form of Western patents and intellectual property rights imposed on weaker peoples; and of liberty in the United States Dares to ask the paradoxical question – is the Rule of Law itself illegal? 

Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal

We can only claim to understand another legal system when we know the context surrounding the positive law in which lawyers are trained. To avoid ethnocentricity and superficiality, we must go beyond judicial decisions, doctrinal writings and the black-letter law of codes and statutes and probe the 'deeper structures' where law meets cultural, political, socio-economic factors. It is only when we acquire such awareness and knowledge of the critical factors affecting both the backgrounds and implications of rules that it becomes possible to control the present and possibly future developments of the world's legal institutions. This collection of essays aims to provide the reader with a fundamental understanding of the dynamic relationship between the law and its cultural, political and socio-economic context.

The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law (Cambridge Companions to Law)

The Ecology of Law Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei argue that at the root of many of the environmental, economic, and social crises we face today is a legal system based on an obsolete worldview. Capra, a bestselling author, physicist, and systems theorist, and Mattei, a distinguished legal scholar, explain how, by incorporating concepts from modern science, the law can become an integral part of bringing about a better world, rather than facilitating its destruction.  This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other—until recently. In the past few decades, science has shifted from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine best understood by analyzing each cog and sprocket to a systems perspective that views the world as a vast network of fluid communities and studies their dynamic interactions. The concept of ecology exemplifies this approach. But law is stuck in the old mechanistic paradigm: the world is simply a collection of discrete parts, and ownership of these parts is an individual right, protected by the state. Capra and Mattei show that this has led to overconsumption, pollution, and a general disregard on the part of the powerful for the common good. Capra and Mattei outline the basic concepts and structures of a legal order consistent with the ecological principles that sustain life on this planet. This is a profound and visionary reconceptualization of the very foundations of the Western legal system, a kind of Copernican revolution in the law, with profound implications for the future of our planet.

The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community

This book enlarges the perspective of comparative law to include the experiences of the non-Western world, which increasingly occupies the center stage in a global approach to the law.  Accordingly, the book incorporates diverse legal materials from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  In addition, it includes a greatly enhanced methodological discussion that brings the book up-to-date with the latest debates in the field

Schlesinger's Comparative Law: Cases, Text, Materials, 7th Edition (University Casebooks)

The comparative study of law and the institutions of law have enriched our understanding of the role law plays in our society by comparing law and legal institutions in different countries, but we have lacked a strong theoretical structure. Scholars studying the role of law in society by applying economic theories have offered a parsimonious theoretical structure with which to understand the relationship between law and society but have tended to focus only on American legal issues. Ugo Mattei joins insights from both areas of scholarship in a productive relationship that furthers our understanding of why societies adopt different laws and why some societies share similar laws.Mattei shows how concepts from economics can be applied to the study of comparative law. He then applies the concepts to several significant problems in comparative law, including the history and sources of law, differences between civil and common law systems, and the reasons for legal change and the movement of law from one country to another. He looks at specific problems in property, contracts, and trust law. Finally he uses the insights he has developed to understand the issues involved in changing law in developing countries and in formerly socialist countries.This book will be of interest to scholars of law, economics, and development, as well as those interested in transformation in formerly communist states.Ugo Mattei is Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International and Comparative Law, Hastings College of Law, University of California; and Professor of Civil Law, University of Trento.

Comparative Law and Economics

In European legal systems, a variety of approaches to trust and relationships of trust meet the universal professionalization of asset management services. This book explores that interface in order to seek a better understanding of the legal regulation of the entrustment of wealth. Within the methodology of the Common Core of European Private Law, the volume presents cases on the establishment and termination of management relationships, obligations of loyalty and of professionalism, and the choice of law.

Commercial Trusts in European Private Law (The Common Core of European Private Law)

Current European private law is being created and influenced by many scholarly and official projects. One of the most comprehensive and long-standing of these is the Common Core of European Private Law Project, launched in 1993. Within this project, over 200 professionals have collaborated to create a painstaking comparative analysis of European legal system with leading scholars from new EU countries addressing both the impact of the integration of EU law into their own legal systems and the challenges that the "Common Core" method of legal analysis faces.

Opening Up European Law: The Common Core Project towards Eastern and South Eastern Europe

This is a methodologically advanced introduction to the main features of the Italian Legal System. Its eighteen chapters cover all the significant changes and innovations that have recently taken place, including:  a new system of private international law;   a greatly altered and expanded body of family law;   a new code of criminal procedure;   fundamental changes in civil procedure;   the effects of European legislation on Italian municipal law;  the reformation of administrative law; and   the latest computer-assisted research tools and techniques used to research Italian law.  Written for academics and lawyers alike, this book is an indispensable tool for those wishing to grasp the context of Italian legal activity. Written by Italian experts at the top of their respective fields, An Introduction to Italian Law is a readable yet technically sophisticated and critical discussion of the systemic features that make the Italian legal system a landmark of the civil law tradition.

Introduction To Italian Law (Introduction to the Laws of Series)

The first attempt to address comparative property law in a common integrative framework, this study discusses German, Italian, French, American, and British property law as mere variations based upon a few fundamental themes through which these nations developed legal systems to provide responses to common economic problems and to set legal foundations for working markets. Basic Principles of Property Law was produced to offer a common framework for the discussion of the law of property within countries in transition, thus it has its basis, not on just one legal system, but on the institutional commonalties that make western property law a working market institution. It offers a major challenge to conventional thinking that in property law the differences between common law and civil law are so important that common core research is impossible.Mattei hopes to guide the reader to think comparatively about property by shedding many preconceived formalistic abstractions. The substance of property law, he argues, is much more common throughout the Western legal tradition than legal scholars would have us believe. Through a set format and accessible writing, this book looks at national legal traditions as responses to common economic problems. It sets the foundations for further much needed integrative comparative legal research in the domain of property law.

Basic Principles of Property Law: A Comparative Legal and Economic Introduction (Contributions in Legal Studies)

L’ideologia dei beni comuni è entrata ormai nel linguaggio accademico, politico e culturale. Intorno ad essa sono nati e cresciuti movimenti, associazioni, iniziative che si propongono di diffonderla nella società civile e di mettere in atto pratiche ad essa ispirate, vedendovi la premessa per lo svilupparsi di rapporti sociali basati sulla condivisione, sulla solidarietà e su forme partecipate di democrazia.
Ma cosa sono i beni comuni? E in cosa si distinguono dagli altri modi di gestire i beni? Cos'ha di diverso e cosa implica una forma di solidarietà basata sul benicomunismo, rispetto alle altre forme di coordinamento sociale?
I saggi raccolti in questo volume sottopongono a un radicale esame critico le idee benicomuniste e contestano la visione caricaturale dei rapporti privatistici e di mercato su cui esse si fondano. Il libro mostra come la nozione di beni comuni che viene solitamente proposta manchi di basi solide e coerenti e dia contributi assai modesti alla comprensione sia dei molteplici intrecci che legano la sfera privata a quella comune, sia degli effetti delle innovazioni tecnologiche e istituzionali degli ultimi decenni. 
L’ideologia dei beni comuni, accompagnata alle confuse e variegate iniziative nate intorno ad essa, si rivela come il tentativo di dare una veste seducentemente nuova a idee vecchie e a modelli assai poco originali di intervento pubblico.
L’analisi critica si estende a una serie di casi concreti di grande attualità come quelli del cibo, dell’acqua, del suolo, della città, dell’ambiente, delle conoscenze, dei beni culturali e delle comunicazioni.

I beni comuni oltre i luoghi comuni (Policy) (Italian Edition)

UC Hastings College of the Law was founded in 1878 as the first law department of the University of California, and today is one of the top-rated law schools in the United States. Our alumni span the globe and are among the most respected lawyers, judges and business leaders today. Our faculty are nationally renowned as both teachers and scholars.

UC Hastings College of the Law

Professor Ugo Mattei attended Law School of the University of Torino, J.D. (1983); UC Berkeley School of Law, LL.M., Fulbright Fellow (1989); and the London School of Economics Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé, Strasbourg. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and the University of Cambridge (Trinity College and Wolfson College), and a visiting professor at Oslo, Berkeley, Montpellier, and Macau.

In 1985 he joined the law school of the University of Trento as an assistant professor and he received tenure as a full professor in 1990. In 1992 he was appointed as a professor in the Faculte' Internationale de Droit Compare' (Strasbourg), where he served for four years. In 1994 he was appointed to the Hastings faculty as the first holder of the Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, succeeding R.B. Schlesinger in teaching Comparative Law. He also teaches Political Economy of Law. In 1997 he accepted a call from the University of Turin, Faculty of Law to succeed the famous Italian scholar Rodolfo Sacco as the Chair of Civil Law.

He is a full member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, a Fellow at the European Law Institute, served as a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law, is a founding editor of Global Jurist, a general editor to the Common Core of European Private Law since its beginning in 1993, and serves as the Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin.

He serves advisory roles in many academic institutions including the Friburg Institute of Comparative Law, the Austrian and the Romanian Societies of Comparative Law and the Institute of Law, Economics and Finances at Copenhagen Business School. He recently masterminded, as lawyer and an activist, the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was successfully completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to endorse Professor Mattei’s scheme to recognize water as a common.

Professor Mattei's work is highly interdisciplinary. He has published eighteen books and more than one hundred other publications in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Ukrainian. His most recent book, published in Italian, a manifesto for the commons, providing the theoretical basis for the current wave of resistance against neoliberalism in Italy, has reached the eighth edition in just six months.

Comparative Law

Economics and the Law

European Community Law

African Law

Anthropological and Ecological Approaches to Law

Italian

English

Courses

Publications

Law Review Articles on SSRN

Why Podemos Or Syriza Scenarios Won't Happen In Italy

How Italians are keeping priceless artefacts out of private hands

The commons: beyond the market vs. state dilemma

After 20-year battle, protests over Italian high-speed train derail

Distinguished Professor of Law and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law

Intervento di ugo Mattei che spiega cosa sono i beni comuni

Ugo Mattei - I Beni Comuni

Intervento di Ugo Mattei; giurista, ordinario diritto civile Univ. di Torino, professore diritto internazionale comparato Univ. della California, presidente ABC Napoli.

11. Ugo Mattei - Costituente dei Beni Comuni #0

Il convegno triennale della Società Italiana di Storia del Diritto offre l'occasione per una visione d'insieme del diritto dall'età greca ai giorni nostri. Nel corso dell'iniziativa dal titolo "La certezza del diritto nell'esperienza storica e attuale", che si terrà da giovedì 2 a sabato 4 dicembre 2010 presso l'Aula Magna della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza a Modena, sarà affrontato il tema della certezza del diritto nell'ambito del diritto greco, del diritto romano nonché nella storia del diritto medievale e moderno.

20) Ugo Mattei Il Common Law

Video recording of the conference "Economics and the Common(s): From Seed Form to Core Paradigm"
May 22 -- 24, 2013

The prevailing dogma of market-fundamentalism has increasingly been called into question as the predatory dynamics of the market economy became clear and as its threats to the biosphere have become more acute. Our conference "Economics and the Common(s): From Seed Form to Core Paradigm" seeks to open up some new vistas in politics, economics and culture by exploring the commons as an alternative worldview and provisioning system, as well as a coherent field of inquiry and action. It will convene approximately 240 commoners -- researchers, practitioners andadvocates from around the world -- to explore the relationship of conventional economics and the commons, showcase key actors and initiatives, and deviseplans for moving the commons paradigm forward.

Keynotes "Management of Natural Commons (Joshua Farley / Ugo Mattei)

Evento "Politica bene comune. Partecipazione, comunità, Europa". Factory - Centro Culturale Giovanile, Nichelino, 23 gennaio 2015
Interventi di Elio Lannutti, presidente nazionale Adusbef, Ugo Mattei, promotore referendum acqua pubblica, Daniele Viotti, parlamentare europeo Pd e Walter Tocci, senatore Pd.

Politica bene comune. Intervento di Ugo Mattei

16th May 2015, 19h, Cinema Europa, Zagreb, Croatia
8th Subversive Film Festival "Spaces of Emancipation: Micropolitics and Rebellions"
Discussion with: Ska Keller (Greens/European Parliament), Florent Marcellesi (EQUO)
Moderated by: Vedran Horvat

The Future of Democracy in Europe and the Transformative Power of the Commons

"For the last few decades, across Europe the pressure on the commons has been intensifying through different kinds of engagement – privatization, expropriation, concession, public-private partnerships – through which public space is narrowed down, the access to resources blocked, and the quality public services deteriorating. In the majority of these cases public interest is directly affected, public authorities usurped, and citizens excluded. Since such decisions are made by parties who, by logic of representative democracy, have legitimacy to negotiate developmental and economic solutions, in a large number of cases critical attitude towards such tendencies is missing. Due to dissatisfaction with such solutions, which at the same time have increasingly damaging influence on citizens’ lives, rights and standard of living because of the rising public debt, paying off interests and compensations through public money, resistance towards such a way of managing public resources is growing. Usurpation of the public and the damage to public interest are becoming a constant in the establishment’s behaviour, provoking waves of protest and creating new social movements, many of which gather around the idea of preserving the commons. Public goods and new visions of more just and participatory relationships become the instigating force and reservoir of new social projects, which not only seek to preserve the access to the public goods, but they also create a new institutional architecture with that aim. Thus the idea of the commons becomes a constitutive force of social movements, towards which all demands for the democratization of political and economic life in Europe gravitate."

Ugo Mattei is Italian lawyer and activist who took part in the occupation of the Teatro Valle in Rome and served as legal advisor to its Statute of the Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune. Apart from that, in his most recent book Beni Comuni. Un Manifesto, he provides the theoretical basis for the current wave of resistance against neoliberalism in Italy. One of the best examples of his struggle for the commons was the successful campaign against the privatisation of water in Italy in which he was one of the few masterminds. The campaign culminated in a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians endorsed the plans for the recognition of water as a common good. After completing his education at the University of Turin’s Law School, the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law and LSE’s Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé in Strasbourg and receiving a Fulbright Fellowship, Mattei has made an exceptional academic career. His appointments as visiting scholar and professor, encompassing three continents, have taken him from Yale to Cambridge and from Montpellier to Macau. In 1994 Mattei became the first holder of the Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law. He combines a fascinating amount of academic publications with a powerful message of activism and with a strong political message on the transformative power of the Commons.

Franziska Maria "Ska" Keller (born 22 November 1981) is a German politician and Member of the European Parliament for the Alliance '90/The Greens. Keller specializes in the issues of migration and the EU's relations with Turkey. Keller studied Islamic studies, Turkish and Jewish Studies at Free University of Berlin. Since 2001 she has been a member of the Green Youth. From 2005 to 2007 she was spokesperson of the Federation of Young European Greens. In 2002 she joined the German Greens. She worked on a state-wide referendum against new coal mines in Brandenburg. In January 2014 she won the Green Primary, a pan-European open primary, together with José Bové, making her one of the "leading candidates" for the European Green Party.

Florent Marcellesi (1979, Angers) is a French politician and environmental activist currently residing in Spain.

http://www.subversivefestival.com/foruml/7/532/en/Ugo_mattei_the_future_of_the_democracy_transformative_power_commons

Ugo Mattei: The Transformative Power of the Commons

LA CASA DELLE CULTURE DI ANCONA INCONTRA UGO MATTEI 
31/01/2014 

Video di Carlo Cardarelli -  "ACUCUBUI MARCHE"

Ugo Mattei - Democrazia partecipativa e beni comuni 1/2

"The weak together can do things better than the strong alone." UC Hastings Chancellor & Dean Frank H. Wu talks with Ugo Mattei, Distinguished Professor of Law & Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law. 

The comments or opinions expressed in this video are the speakers' own and should not be taken as a statement, opinion, position, or endorsement by UC Hastings.

Harmonica by George Bisharat.

The Commons: Fiat Justitia with Ugo Mattei

UGO MATTEI: "DIRITTO DI RESISTENZA PER L'EX COLORIFICIO LIBERATO DI PISA"

Venezia, 22 gennaio 2011. Il prof. Ugo Mattei al convegno "Uniti contro la Crisi" presso il centro sociale Rivolta.

Select Inquiry Type