Two generations of italian public lawyers compared: Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Santi Romano

In the first decades of the 20th century, in Italy, there was a lively debate within the school of public law on the transformation of the Liberal State into an Administrative State. The main architects of this dialogue were Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Santi Romano. The former is the standard bearer of the purism of the legal method for which political, social and historical problems have no right of citizenship in the science of public law. For Santi Romano, on the other hand, the boundary between state and society, between the legal order and the political order tends to blur and, therefore, historical reality also appears within the narrow confines of scientific reflection