Università Bocconi - Department of Legal Studies

Angelo Sraffa Department of Legal Studies

The Angelo Sraffa Department of Legal Studies and the Law School are prominent research and teaching institutions at the national and international level.

The Department has a strong, even if not exclusive, focus on the law governing economic activities in a comparative and historical perspectives, with particular emphasis on business law and economic relationships,  commercial transactions, financial markets. From the different points of views of the single areas of research and teaching, a significant part of the law Faculty concentrates on the economic implications of legal rules from diverse but intertwined perspectives, from administrative law to labor law, from constitutional law to white collars' crimes, from litigation & ADRs to corporations and taxation, bankruptcy, capital markets and financial regulation, including banking law, from competition law and IP to contracts and torts, from EU law to international law. 

Methodologically, the Law Department pursues an international and comparative approach without neglecting the important national dimension of legal issues. In addition, our work often adopts an interdisciplinary approach, something essential also because our law faculty constantly interacts with colleagues and students with interests ranging from finance to economics, from statistics to computer science, from accounting to business administration, from sociology to political science. 

Finally, our goals are to promote a virtuous integration between more theoretical and practical approaches; to combine attention to general policy issues but also to the law in action; to pursue both empirical analysis and more doctrinal studies. We seek to encourage and cultivate the dialogue not only among scholars, but also with the legislature, supervisory authorities and regulators, judges and practitioners. Several members of the faculty, for example, in addition to therir scholarship, have been or are actively involved in legislative reforms and regulatory activities both at the national and international level, acted as consultant for national and international institutions, organizations and public or private entities, or have served in institutional capacities as civil servants or judges and justices.

Corporate Governance

Corporate Governance is clearly at the center of the work of many members of the Department, with the awarness that corporate governance must increasingly be intended in a broad sense in light of its correlation with economic, political and social issues. The implication is that we approach corporate governance issues not only from a more traditional, technical and narrow corporate law point of view, but we also cultivate the implications of corporate governance studied from other research fields. In this perspective, through our affiliation with ECGI in particular, we aim not only to further develop our work in the area of corporations and financial markets regulation and promote its international visibility and footprint, but also to contribute to analyze the interconnections between business organizations, the economy and the society.