Contro lo «spirito di severità»: garanzie e mitigazione dei dispositivi penali in Tommaso Briganti

Tommaso Briganti's work was one of the most original expressions of the italian criminalistic doctrine in the eighteenth century. The scientific elaboration of the apulian jurist began from the grafting on the doctrinal tradition of the contributions of some of the most significant currents of modern culture: from sixteenth-century skepticism to the thought of the crisis of european’s conscience. That culture fueled the scholar's renewing inspiration and, at the same time, with his realistic approach, helped to keep him away from any abstract utopian pattern. The jurist was induced to search in the normative patrimony of the Kingdom of Naples and in the doctrinal tradition all the ways that could be used to broaden the guarantees, reducing arbitrators and mitigating the rigor of penal repression. That method proved fruitful. Briganti traced – without anticipating the anti-jurisprudential radicalism that would have characterized the mature Enlightenment – through the tools offered by a science at the same time endowed with a robust technical armor and open to dialogue with extra-juridical knowledge, the lines of a possible reform of the criminal system of law, fueling the debates of the decades to come