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
Education
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Université Catholique Louvain 2019
Ph.D. Honoris Causa
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University of California at Berkeley, School of Law 1989
LL.M., Law
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Law School of the University of Torino 1983
J.D., Law
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Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé, Strasbourg, France. 1982
Diplome de deuxième cycle.
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London School of Economics, Modern English Law Program 1980
Certificate awarded with distinction and merit
Accomplishments
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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
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On Coase and Commons 2022
LE DROIT SANS FRONTIÈRES: MÉLANGES POUR FRANZ WERRO, 459–85
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Letter to a Mentor (with Elisabetta Grande) 2021
3 PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGIST 277
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The Chinese Advantage in Emergency Law (with Liu Guanghua and Emanuele Ariano) 2021
21 GLOBAL JURIST 1
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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
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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
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Communology: The Emergence of a Social Theory of the Commons (with Mark Mancall) 2019
118 S. ATL. Q. 725
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Having, Being, and the Commons 2018
Co-Designing Economies in Transition
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Beni culturali, beni comuni, estrazione 2017
Patrimonio culturale: profili giuridici e tecniche di tutela (RomaTrE-Press)
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Protecting the Commons: Water, Culture, and Nature: The Commons Movement in the Italian Struggle against Neoliberal Governance 2013
South Atlantic Quarterly
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A Theory of Imperial Law: A Study on US Hegemony and the Latin Resistance 2002
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies
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The Functions of Trust Law: A Comparative Legal and Economic Analysis 1998
New York University Law Review
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Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World's Legal Systems 1997
American Journal of Comparative Law
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Efficiency in Legal Transplants: an Essay in Comparative Law and Economics 1994
International Review of Law and Economics