Why Study Law in Comics?

In this chapter, I will try to explain why the analysis of the representation of law provided by comics can be very useful in shedding light on some major themes of legal theory and constitutional law. In a seminal piece, Asimow emphasised the potential of pop culture when teaching law courses:

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to this exercise that also apply to the use of comics. On the one hand, students will certainly be aided in their understanding of legal dynamics by the use of comic book stories and characters. The use of comics will also reduce the existing gap in knowledge between professors and students, in the sense that students will be able to start from a knowledge of the stories that will facilitate interaction. On the other hand, the vision that comics offer of law is certainly simplified or, rather, presents the same clichés that ordinary people have of law. As a law professor, I have to say that my students have generally always been more fascinated by outlaws than by the guardians of legality. Make no mistake, though, here the notion of outlaw does not necessarily include only villains, but also many of what we would call superheroes. This is also explained by the fact that the world in which these actors operate is often based on corrupt power dynamics. In this chapter, I will try to show the usefulness of comics-based legal research in investigating the pathological side of law, with particular reference to two phenomena: the insufficiency of law in the fight for justice and the use of laws as instruments for creating discrimination. These are obviously only two examples among many possible ones. In this sense, the chapter makes no claim to exhaustiveness.

This book explores how comics, animated series and pop music represent law, reflecting and shaping public perception. It adopts a comparative and international law approach, involving diverse scholars and going beyond Anglo-American culture to enrich the legal debate. This innovative collection fills a crucial gap in both legal and cultural studies.

While there is an established tradition in this field within Anglo-Saxon academic contexts, in continental Europe, works like those included in this volume remain relatively rare.

This book is the product of a long journey that began before the pandemic and continued with virtual and in-person seminars that allowed us to gather a group of scholars interested in how the relationship between law and justice is represented in comics and other pop culture products.

Over recent years, we have been organising an annual event that explores the intersection of law and pop culture. These events are primarily aimed at an academic audience but remain open to others. They bring together lawyers and non-lawyers – such as media sociologists and political philosophers – to examine the relationship between law and morality within various fictional worlds. The inaugural sessions featured Batman and Daredevil as focal points.

Inspired by the positive reception and media interest these events generated, the STALS research group (Sant’Anna Legal Studies) hosted an online event titled Law, Justice, and Pop Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. This full-day event, which can be viewed on the STALS YouTube channel, brought together diverse perspectives on the topic. Building on this momentum, we proposed to the Italian Society of Comparative and European Public Law (Diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo) that its annual conference, held in the Department of Law of the University of Foggia, should focus on the representation of legal traditions in pop culture. The call for papers, issued in Italian, attracted significant interest and culminated in a nearly 800-page volume edited by us, Aldo Ligustro and Rolando Tarchi.

Encouraged by the success of these initiatives, our STALS team – together with Paolo Addis and Luca Gori – decided to extend this project to high schools. We organised a series of lectures in Lucca, home to the renowned Lucca Comics & Games festival, Europe's largest comic and gaming convention. This initiative was carried out in partnership with the Centro Maria Eletta Martini, Fondazione per la Coesione Sociale Onlus and Lucca Crea.

Stranger Things, the popular Netflix series, has contributed to the rediscovery of the legendary 1980s, with music, stories, games and characters.

For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, many of the themes and characters explored in the previous pages are a part of our youth. Many years later, we are pleased to revisit them in a scholarly work that holds a very special meaning for us.

For us, this, to say it in Carcass’ words, is a heartwork (‘Food for thought, so prolific’).

This, together with the good fortune of coordinating a group of extraordinary Authors, made this volume a truly unforgettable experience.

The cultural representations of law in culture, as we tried to show, are innumerable and diverse. They range from those written, thought and enjoyed by professionals, such as textbooks, commentaries and decisions, to those that tell us about law in the most diverse cultural fields, such as comics, cinema, literature, music and so on.

The group of scholars we had the honour of coordinating showed how the media they studied consider a representation of law that is somehow oriented, that is to say, they reconstruct the legal phenomenon or some of its factual elements with the aim of highlighting only some of its aspects, be they positive or negative, in order to tell us a story (and not the story) of law.

Moreover, for us, these pages represent another brick in an ongoing wall built by a research agenda that we find highly promising.

This agenda builds on a strong foundation of deep relationships, some of which became friendships, and a series of prior achievements. It aims to further develop through collaboration and exploration.

We are firmly convinced, indeed, that the pages of this book can serve not only as a basis for more reflections on the connections between law and justice, as well as between law, justice and pop music in general, and graphic literature in particular. At the same time, they also serve as tools to disseminate knowledge about all these remarkable expressions of human creativity.

This chapter argues that the particular variety of populism in effect in Italy that has been labelled PopSovism is interesting to comparative lawyers for many reasons. The chapter explains that in the Italian case, restrictions of migrants’ rights represent a form of democratic decay in populist time. This phenomenon was particularly evident during the first Conte government, when Italy became the first European country in which two self-styled populist forces formed a coalition government, but its roots can be found even earlier. Italian populism has ancient roots and restrictions of migrants’ rights preceded and continued after the populist wave. At the same time, the nativist approach to migrants should not be seen as the only manifestation of democratic decay in Italy, which is broader in nature. As a consequence, resilience through legislative reforms is not likely to be forthcoming. More success can be expected if resilience is pursued through judicial remedies both at national and international level.

This chapter argues that the particular variety of populism in effect in Italy that has been labelled PopSovism is interesting to comparative lawyers for many reasons. The chapter explains that in the Italian case, restrictions of migrants’ rights represent a form of democratic decay in populist time. This phenomenon was particularly evident during the first Conte government, when Italy became the first European country in which two self-styled populist forces formed a coalition government, but its roots can be found even earlier. Italian populism has ancient roots and restrictions of migrants’ rights preceded and continued after the populist wave. At the same time, the nativist approach to migrants should not be seen as the only manifestation of democratic decay in Italy, which is broader in nature. As a consequence, resilience through legislative reforms is not likely to be forthcoming. More success can be expected if resilience is pursued through judicial remedies both at national and international level.

Throughout this book, I have maintained that populism and constitutionalism, and in particular post–WWII constitutionalism (of which Italy is a prime example, as seen in Chapter 2) cannot be reconciled, due to the exclusionary, holistic and majoritarian nature of populism. As we saw in Chapter 1, this does not mean that populism and constitutionalism cannot have something in common, namely the importance of emotional reactions and the distrust of political power.

‘Constitutions belong to all but are not “empty” (politically neutral)’.1 With these words an eminent constitutional lawyer reacted to a series of attacks launched on the Italian Constitution by some political parties at the beginning of the new millennium. Indeed, the irony in this is that the new wave of populisms has been obliging constitutional lawyers to deal with some long-standing issues, including that of the neutrality of constitutions. Instead of embarking on a large-scale comparison, which may risk missing the historic roots of these phenomena, in this volume the analysis will be carried out by focusing on some important instruments of constitutional democracy –referendums and the prohibition of the imperative mandate, among others – and this will ensure consistency and coherence with the comparative law analysis carried out throughout the book. In this sense, while the present book has a precise focus on the Italian case, this does not exclude the possibility of framing this national case in a comparative perspective, as it is an ideal case study of post–World War II (WWII) constitutionalism.

For research like that carried out in this book, diachronic comparison and historical research are essential to show why some of the ambiguities that remained after World War II favoured the emergence of different waves of populism in Italy. The aim of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, I shall clarify why the Italian case is so important to study the relationship between constitutionalism and populism. On the other hand, Italian political culture partly explains the variety of populisms experienced in the country.

In this chapter, I will analyse a case study that is crucial to exploring the way in which populists understand identity politics, while in subsequent chapters, I will investigate the perspective of politics of immediacy. The concepts of mimetism and parasitism presented in Chapter 1 will be tested, and the notion of sovereignism (‘sovranismo’) – frequently alluded to in the Italian debate and elsewhere – will be used as a case study.

In this chapter, I shall investigate the aspect of the politics of immediacy, exploring how populists understand the referendum. Following an idea endorsed by Davide Casaleggio, the mastermind of the Rousseau platform,1 former Minister Riccardo Fraccaro2 denounced the insufficiency of classic representative democracy and stressed the need for more direct democracy, especially with the advent of new technologies.

This book is the outcome of two projects that I have coordinated over the last four years. The first one is a Jean Monnet project called European Public Law-ius (Eur.Publ.ius), which was funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Union. The project, which ended in 2019, was devoted to the current challenges faced by the European Union, and of course among them there is the rise of authoritarian populisms in Hungary and Poland with the well-known rule of law crisis.