Silvia Ferreri

Brief Biography

Professor Ferreri had her first teaching experience at the Bocconi University in Milan, where she was a young researcher starting in 1980. In 1983, she became a lecturer in comparative law at the University of Turin School Of Law, working under the leadership of Professor Rodolfo Sacco. She published her first two books: the first one deals with the harmonization of the legal systems (including a study of the mechanisms of incorporation of international instruments into a national legal system, comparing different approaches to the problem of integrating foreign sources into one's own complex of rules and concepts); the second one is a comparative research on the remedies to recover possession of moveables in the opposition between the proprietary outlook of the civil law and the tortious approach of the common law. She also taught Comparative Law in the recently created University of Eastern Piedmont (Alessandria). She got national tenure in 1992, and full professorship in 1996, teaching in Venice, Alessandria and Turin where she was elected on the Chair of Comparative Law, created by Rodolfo Sacco, in 2002.

Three more books have been written between 1998 and 2006: one in cooperation with a former judge at the Italian Constitutional Court (A. Pizzorusso) on the system of written sources of law in Italy (with special focus on the mechanisms and reactions of local law to foreign sources such as European legislation and international conventions); a second work on the interpretation of contract, especially on the parallel between the strictly literal attitude of the common lawyers and the more flexible legislative prescriptions about interpretation in the civil codes of the Roman tradition; a third book in cooperation with Prof. Alberto Musy on the contract of sale, with special attention for the comparison between the local legislative frame of the contract and the features of the International Sale of Goods as shaped by the Vienna convention of 1980 (CISG).

Prof. Ferreri also published articles in the field of comparative legal terminology; in relation to phenomena of globalisation of law; in connection with the enactment of international conventions and about the effect of instruments of soft law such as the Lando Principles of Contract Law (PECL). She is a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, an active contributor to the Association H. Capitant des amis de la culture juridique française and is a member of several national teams sponsored by the Ministry of Research. She participates in the Acquis Group (an international working team sponsored by the Commission of the European Union to restate and bring up to date the "acquis communautaire" in the field of contract law: references are available on the internet at www.acquis-group.org).

One of Prof. Fereri's main area of research is the relationship between law and language, with a special interest in the effort to shape a European language of the law, in the process by which English is becoming the means of communication within Europe: a great deal is to be learned in the gradual transformation of a language connected with the common law tradition into a "lingua franca", a "globish" instrument incorporating words and concepts deriving from many different local traditions. She works on a national project with the University of Milan with Prof. Antonio Gambaro on "multilingual legislation."