“Meek Law” is the English translation of “diritto mite,” the title of a book published in 1992 by the constitutional law teacher Gustavo Zagrebelsky, who was from 1995 to 2004 a judge and in 2004 the president of the Italian Constitutional Court. Following an encyclopedic approach, the book outlines the idea and the essence of the law in the so-called “Constitutional State” at the end of the twentieth century. It supports a sovereignty of the constitution and criticizes the traditional positivism insofar as the constitution opens the law to a social dimension in a pluralism of principles separated from votes (Zagrebelsky 2009, 102). Meek law theory is considered a variation of “neo-constitutionalism” (La Torre 2010).
Meekness in law is not just sweet mildness or leniency opposed to the harshness of criminal law (in the principle of lex mitior), but an aspiration or ideal of the entire legal order of a society grounded on a pluralism of principles that characterizes the spirit of the...
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Luther, J. (2023). Meek Law. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6519-1_174
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