Mauro Grondona

Università di Genova

Alexander Pekelis: life, work and ideas

2008-2009: Fall

Mauro Grondona was born in Genoa, Italy, on September 15, 1972. He was trained in law at the University of Genoa and graduated in 1996. After a four year post-graduate scholarship from the University of Genoa, he received a PhD in Private Law from the University of Pisa (2005). He currently teaches Private Law at the University of Genoa (Faculty of Law).
He is author of two books (La clausola risolutiva espressa, 1998; L’ordine giuridico dei privati, 2008, forthcoming) and several papers on topics such as contract law, tort law, family law, interpretation of the law, and comparative law.
His main interests in his research work are the role and the power of the judge, and the history of legal ideas and their impact on society.
In his semester at the Italian Academy, he will work on the exemplary figure of Alexander Pekelis, a jurist and a legal philosopher who escaped from Russia in 1917, living first in Italy (where he taught Legal Theory at the University of Rome "La Sapienza") and then, due to the Fascist Racial Laws, in the USA, becoming, along the path of Legal Realism, a pioneer in the social research against the excesses of Legal Formalism.