La legalità disegnata. Appunti su disposizioni non testuali e diritto penale

The work aims to investigate – from a peculiar criminal law perspective – the constitutive-pragmatic and not only epistemic relevance of non-textual rules, which accompany the usual textual rules in different areas of the legal system. If traditionally social objects are inscribed in linguistic-verbal propositions, nevertheless the construc- tion of social reality abounds with examples of non-textual rules. Once the possibility of theoretically conceiving social objects descended from non-textual provisions has been probed, the investigation identifies a working hypothesis to reconcile – in the criminal law context – this conclusion with the principle of legality. The analysis continues with an example of three different hypotheses of non-textual rules: non-textual rules inte- grating textual rules (the example is the road signals); non-textual rules complementary to textual ones (the example is the workplace health and safety signals); finally, autono- mous non-textual rules (the example is the project).