The PHD in Public Legal Studies is divided into three addresses - constitutional, criminal and administrative law - and embraces the following scientific disciplinary sectors: public law, constitutional law, ecclesiastical law, comparative public law, history of law, criminal law, criminal procedural law, administrative law. Its main objective is to train future jurists, especially in the public sphere, allowing them to orient themselves in the coordinates of contemporary society and to deepen the most urgent legal questions of our time. The acquisition of high professional and technical skills, especially on the front of litigation and the criminal and administrative process, as well as in consulting for public and private institutions and high administration, represent one of the main purposes of the doctoral course.
The constitutional change induced by the phenomena that, hastily but effectively, go under the name of globalization, obliges the public law and the criminal law scholar to rethink, even in a historical and diachronic perspective, the great themes of modernity: State, market, punishment, justice, administration, just to evoke the most polysemic concepts. This changed institutional context brings to the attention of the jurist the profiles of fundamental rights that will have a strong centrality in the doctoral course, as decisive protagonists of the contemporary scene. The Fundamental Rights Adjudication, for example, represents a performance by States and supranational organizations that implies the management of historical and cultural skills, as well as practices, inherent to constitutional and criminal law.
It is also evident that the supranational integration of legal systems, which is strongly intertwined with the globalization of markets, has an impact, even at a European level, in the field of rights, the general principles of criminal and administrative law and the trial. Understanding these phenomena therefore requires new tools that are able to draw on more legal knowledge and that enhance historical depth.
The crisis of the legal categories of the constitutional state and, more generally, of modern constitutionalism, must not push the jurist, in particular the younger generations of jurists, to step back or to give up the role of the interpreter to wear, lazily, those of the disenchanted spectator. The discouraging post-modern deconstruction, indeed, must leave room for a courageous rethinking of the lexicon of law and a critical re-reading of it. Providing doctoral students in public legal studies with the tools to orient themselves and to govern the complexity of the contemporary legal order is the main objective of the doctoral course.
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