Between Constantine and Augustine: novelties of ancient perspectives in the relationship between justice and justice

During the 20th Century Europe has been affected by dramatic conflicts between different visions of the world. These conflicts were based on ideological representations of reality and aimed to pursue the systematic erasing of the adversary. The path to recovery of individual subjectivity, as a human category, crucial for the full comprehension of the experience and its meaning, represents a significant positive component of post-modern contemporary philosophy: it traces back to the thought of Saint Augustine, the philosopher who placed the interiority of existence, considered in its transcendental quality, in the horizon of temporality, so affirming the undisputed centrality of the relationship between law and justice. The anthropological innovation contained in such development reflects, today, on the ground of the legal thinking, orienting it in a de-structuring sense with respect to the formalistic models that ruled in legal science for most of the 20th Century, so that the traditional conceptual schemes are considered totally or partially unproductive compared to the frames offered by the Constitutions and their principles, while a need of justice as legal standard raises again; the very need that seemed to have strongly diminished in the very last part of the past century. The historian of law takes such changes as an occasion for a deep reflection on the role and tasks of the jurist and, at the same time, as the renewal of a comparison, that marked the whole historic development of law between the middle-age and contemporary age, between different, rather opposite models: one based on Thomism and the thought of Aristotle; the other individualistic.