Chairs:

• Jorge Alberto Colmenares Mantilla jorge.colmenares@uexternado.edu.co
• Cristian Eduardo Aedo Barrena caedo@ucsc.cl
• Andrea Trisciuoglio andrea.trisciuoglio@unito.it

From the earliest Roman legal-political structures to modern populism, the notion of the public and of the social form as res—a “thing”—has served the most varied identity-based or relational experiments, whether democratic or oligarchic, liberal or authoritarian, paternalistic or totalitarian. Concepts such as the “public thing” or the “public good” have been defined and characterized in both material and abstract terms, through linguistic functions and dialectical topoi, enabling, alternatively, ideas capable of incorporating different—indeed opposing—conceptions of the collective and of the legitimate exercise of power.

For this reason, the proposed workshop begins with a linguistic and conceptual analysis of how the public and the common are characterized from the perspective of the res, since within the framework of certain devices stemming from the Western legal tradition, it is possible to provide valuable tools to orient contemporary debates on political forms and on the dangers concealed by their apparent “neutrality.” Along this path, and in relation to the way humans interact with their environment—especially in times that are critical for the preservation of life as we know it—it becomes imperative to examine the different schemes of belonging that can be identified in Roman legal experience. This helps demystify the notion that the bourgeois proprietary paradigm embedded in nineteenth-century civil codes—especially the Code civil and the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB)—is the only possible framework for conceiving an adequate legal protection of human rights over things.

This return to Roman thought allows for the construction of a conceptual framework that re-dimensions the legal notion of property, not only from the perspective of civil law but also through the various experiences that incorporate it within the constitutional sphere. This approach recovers ab initio its complexity and ductility, which make it capable of supporting different ways of manifesting in the real world, taking into account the infinite variety of things that exist. To understand how this process affects Latin American constitutionalism, it is useful to observe how Roman experience—shaped by Stoic philosophy and delineated generally through Gaius’s institutional system—entered first into Chilean codification and was later embraced by the 1980 Political Constitution of Chile. Article 19, No. 24, paragraph 1 ensures for all persons property over all kinds of corporeal and incorporeal goods, which has led to the “propertization of rights.” This doctrinal development distinguishes between property (which includes dominium, associated with corporeal things), the right to property (detached from Roman tradition, which tied dominium to corporeal things), and property over other rights, understood according to the fundamental element of the Gaius distinction—namely, the idea of titularity incorporated into the patrimony.

Finally, re-dimensioning the different schemes of belonging through historical-dogmatic analysis underscores the idea that Roman law on public goods has influenced constitutional-level norms in Europe and Latin America, particularly regarding the public–private goods dichotomy. This dichotomy has been enriched by the presence of a tertium genus: the commons, which belong to citizens and trace back to the Roman classical jurisprudential category of res communis omnium. Special attention will therefore be given to the constitutional importance acquired by goods such as the landscape and the historical-artistic heritage.