Inaugurazione Anno Accademico 2023-2024

Guido Calabresi was born in Milano, Italy on October 18, 1932 in a wealthy family of Jewish extraction which had been in Italy since Roman times. His mother, Bianca Finzi-Contini’s ancestors included Giulio Del Vecchio, one of the first professors of statistics in the world, his son Giorgio Del Vecchio, President of Rome University whose library remains its centerpiece. Bianca’s Uncle, Gustavo Del Vecchio was President of the Bocconi University and Minister of Finance and of the Treasury in the DeGasperi administration when President Einaudi was Minister of the Budget. Guido’s father’s family were among the oldest and largest land owners in the Ferrarese. His father and his aunts were strong anti-fascists, and were among the earliest and most active members of Giustizia e Libertá, pupils and followers of Salvemini and closest friends of the Rosselli brothers. When these were killed, Guido’s father decided that he and his family had to flee Italy. They did and arrived in the United States, when Guido was 6, without a penny! With great effort they ultimately established themselves in America, Guido’s father becoming Professor of Cardiology at Yale, his mother Professor of French and Italian Literature at Albertus Magnus College, and his brother Paolo a world renowned Professor of Oncology.

Guido studied in the United States and as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England, ranking first in his classes in both Economics at Yale and Oxford and then in Law at Yale. He became law clerk to Justice Hugo Black on the United States Supreme Court, and returned to teach law at Yale in 1959. In 1961, at the age of 29, he became a full Professor, the youngest in the history of Yale Law School. In that same year he published his first of many articles, Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts, which revolutionized the field and together with a contemporaneous article (published a few months later) by Ronald Coase, became the foundation of the field of Law and Economics. Guido’s subsequent book The Cost of Accidents (1970), translated in innumerable languages including, of course, Italian, established the field as central to law in America and subsequently worldwide. Unlike some other famous devotès of the field, Guido did not merely use Economics to understand Law better, but also Law to reform and advance Economic Theory. It remains a classic.

In 1972 Guido (with his then student A. Douglas Melamed) published an article: Property Rules, Liability Rues, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral, that so profoundly analyzed the relationship between Contract Law, Civil Responsibility (Torts) and Criminal Law and their use in Libertarian, Collectivist and Social Democratic societies, that it became and remains the most cited Private Law article of all time.

Shortly after he published (with his then student, Philip Bobbitt), a book Tragic Choices which analyzes how legal systems deal with choices that must be made but cannot be made decently. It too became a worldwide classic and its analysis has been a key to understanding what 50 years later has been the legal, economic and medical actions taken in response to the COVID 19 pandemic.

His third book, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes, has also achieved worldwide fame. And its analysis of the relationship between court made and statutory law has been cited by some of the world’s leading judges (e.g. Aharon Barak of Israel, Sabino Cassese of Italy, Judith Kaye of the United States) as having shaped their thinking.

His more recent books, too many to list individually, but two of which were published originally in Italian [Il Mestiere del Giudice, and, a few weeks ago, Driverless Cars (with Enrico Al Mureden)], have continued the tradition of being, in each case, path breaking.