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Ugo
Mattei

Ray L. Sullivan Professor of Law

  • Email Address matteiu@uchastings.edu
Download CV

Biography

Professor Ugo Mattei attended Law School of the University of Torino, J.D. (1983); UC Berkeley School of Law, LL.M., Fulbright Fellow (1989); and the London School of Economics Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé, Strasbourg. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and the University of Cambridge (Trinity College and Wolfson College), and a visiting professor at Oslo, Berkeley, Montpellier, and Macau.

In 1985 he joined the law school of the University of Trento as an assistant professor and he received tenure as a full professor in 1990. In 1992 he was appointed as a professor in the Faculte’ Internationale de Droit Compare’ (Strasbourg), where he served for four years. In 1994 he was appointed to the Hastings faculty as the first holder of the Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, succeeding R.B. Schlesinger in teaching Comparative Law. He also teaches Political Economy of Law. In 1997 he accepted a call from the University of Turin, Faculty of Law to succeed the famous Italian scholar Rodolfo Sacco as the Chair of Civil Law.

He is a full member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, a Fellow at the European Law Institute, served as a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law, is a founding editor of Global Jurist, a general editor to the Common Core of European Private Law since its beginning in 1993, and serves as the Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin.

He serves advisory roles in many academic institutions including the Friburg Institute of Comparative Law, the Austrian and the Romanian Societies of Comparative Law and the Institute of Law, Economics and Finances at Copenhagen Business School. He recently masterminded, as lawyer and an activist, the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was successfully completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to endorse Professor Mattei’s scheme to recognize water as a common.

Professor Mattei’s work is highly interdisciplinary. He has published eighteen books and more than one hundred other publications in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Ukrainian. His most recent book, published in Italian, a manifesto for the commons, providing the theoretical basis for the current wave of resistance against neoliberalism in Italy, has reached the eighth edition in just six months.

Expertise

  • International Law

Education

  1. Université Catholique Louvain 2019

    Ph.D. Honoris Causa

  2. University of California at Berkeley, School of Law 1989

    LL.M., Law

  3. Law School of the University of Torino 1983

    J.D., Law

  4. Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé, Strasbourg, France. 1982

    Diplome de deuxième cycle.

  5. London School of Economics, Modern English Law Program 1980

    Certificate awarded with distinction and merit

Accomplishments

  1. Activist Work 2011

    Successfully masterminded, as lawyer and an activist, the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to endorse Professor Mattei’s scheme to recognize water as a common.

Selected Scholarship

  1. On Coase and Commons 2022

    LE DROIT SANS FRONTIÈRES: MÉLANGES POUR FRANZ WERRO, 459–85

  2. Letter to a Mentor (with Elisabetta Grande) 2021

    3 PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGIST 277

  3. The Chinese Advantage in Emergency Law (with Liu Guanghua and Emanuele Ariano) 2021

    21 GLOBAL JURIST 1

  4. Do Smart Things Make Us Dumb? Reflections on the Addiction Crisis of Cyborg Consumerism 2020

    Rev. Eur. Droit La Consomm / Eur. J. Consum. L. 613

  5. Property Meeting the Challenge of the Commons (with Alessandra Quarta) 2020

    General Reports of the XXth General Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law 23

  6. Communology: The Emergence of a Social Theory of the Commons (with Mark Mancall) 2019

    118 S. ATL. Q. 725

  7. Having, Being, and the Commons 2018

    Co-Designing Economies in Transition

  8. Beni culturali, beni comuni, estrazione 2017

    Patrimonio culturale: profili giuridici e tecniche di tutela (RomaTrE-Press)

  9. Protecting the Commons: Water, Culture, and Nature: The Commons Movement in the Italian Struggle against Neoliberal Governance 2013

    South Atlantic Quarterly

  10. A Theory of Imperial Law: A Study on US Hegemony and the Latin Resistance 2002

    Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

  11. The Functions of Trust Law: A Comparative Legal and Economic Analysis 1998

    New York University Law Review

  12. Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World's Legal Systems 1997

    American Journal of Comparative Law

  13. Efficiency in Legal Transplants: an Essay in Comparative Law and Economics 1994

    International Review of Law and Economics

Courses

  1. Comparative Law
  2. Political Economy of the Law

Links

  1. Publications
  2. Law Review Articles on SSRN

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02/01/19
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