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Judging the Mafia: Categorization under Law and Moral Economies in Italy (1980–2010)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Deborah Puccio-Den
Deborah Puccio-Den*
Affiliation:
CNRS, France
*
Deborah Puccio-Den, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 3 Rue Michel-Ange, 75016 Paris, France. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper describes the work that jurists, prosecutors, judges and experts had to carry out – sometimes paying with their own life – to defend the thesis that the mafia actually exists. It underlines the effects of this assertion for the ‘moral economy’ of Italian society. The paper starts with a historical reconstruction of the process that led to a legal definition of the mafia as a ‘criminal association’ in September 1982. This juridical recognition was the precondition to any possible trial against this particular secret society. It then analyzes the judicial viability of this initial definition – known as the ‘Buscetta Theorem’ from the name of the former member of the mafia who eventually revealed its structure to the Italian prosecutors – which focused on the organized and centralized nature of the mafia, and the subsequent adjustments of this original formulation to the diffused nature of the mafia phenomenon, producing new penal categories that redefine the boundaries between legal and illegal worlds. The ongoing debates about this definition within Italian society shed a light onto the limits of what can or cannot be accepted within a democratic society.

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Information
Diogenes , Volume 60 , Issue 3-4: The Boundaries of Law. Justice, Powers, and Politics , November 2013 , pp. 12 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2015

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