Assist. Prof. Dr. Francesca Caroccia

Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

Curriculum Vitae

Francesca Caroccia studied law at La Sapienza University in Rome and holds a master’s degree in consumer and tort law. In 2004, she received her PhD in comparative law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Molise with a thesis on “L’interpretazione del contratto nei Principi UNIDROIT dei contratti commerciali internazionali. Regole ermeneutiche tra autonomia ed eterointegrazione”. Since 2008, Francesca Caroccia is Assistant Professor (Ricercatore universitario) in private law at the University of L’Aquila. Being active as a lawyer since 2005, she is a former consultant on juridical affairs of the Italian Minister of Internal Affairs. In 2009 and in 2015, Francesca Caroccia was Visiting Professor for international and competition law and taught private law at the University of Toulouse (France). Following a first research stay at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” from July to December 2013, she was from May to September 2016, once again Fellow in Bonn.

Research Project

Public Order and Private Law: Managing Cultural Conflicts in the Age of Globalization

Globalization lays down a big challenge to jurists: that is, the settlement of cultural conflicts, at different juridical levels. In every legal system, the circulation and interaction (sometimes the fight) of different cultural models produce new political instances. However, the political answer often is not sufficient, or clear. In these cases, law has to make up for the lack of political responses: the “public order” clause probably is the most useful tool in managing the continuous and rapid cultural changes in modern society. As a general clause, it is a vague category, which resumes and represents the heritage of juridical principles and values, characterizing every single State. Such a vagueness gives to the interpreter a wide discretional power, but at the same time it confers on legal systems a good level of elasticity and adaptive capacity. In private law, the judicial use of this clause is increasingly augmented. Public order is perceived as a filter, aimed at selecting situations, which could be admitted in a particular legal system, according its specific culture. In these cases, the risk of judicial arbitrariness is very high. Therefore, it is strongly necessary to identify the specific range of values used by the judge, when he adopts his decision. Such an identification process could be useful not only to reduce the judicial discretional power, but also to understand the political weight of judicial statements.

Selected Publications

Sulla distinzione tra interpretazione della legge e interpretazione del contratto, in: F. Caroccia, F. Marinelli, F. Politi: Questioni di teoria dell’interpretazione giuridica. L’interpretazione giuridica e la certezza del diritto, L’Aquila: L’Una 2014.
Analisi economica del diritto: the Italian Job (with R. Pardolesi), in: Foro italiano, 2014, 9, V, pp. 193-234.
Sulla legittimità delle situazioni condizionali potestative (a proposito di un dibattito nella dottrina francese), in Contratto e impresa/Europa, 2014, 1, pp. 218-256.
Contratto d’opera intellettuale, in: F. Marinelli, F. Caroccia: Contratto d’opera e prestazione d’opera intellettuale, in: Trattato di diritto civile del Consiglio nazionale del notariato (ed. by P. Perlingieri), Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2013.
Italian edition of the volume by T. Kirat: Quale diritto per l’economia? (original title: Economie du droit, with an introduction by G. Alpa, Paris: La Découverte 1999), Milano: EGEA 2013.
Ricerche in tema di elementi accidentali, L’Aquila: TEXTUS 2012.
Translation of the work by A.-J. Arnaud: Governanti senza frontiere. Tra mondializzazione e post-mondializzazione (original title: Critique de la raison juridique 2: Gouvernants sans frontières. Entre mondialisation et post-mondialisation, Paris: LGDJ 2003), Naples: ESI 2011.
L’interpretazione del contratto, Naples: ESI 2006.