Professor of Applied Legal Theory, Coordinator of the PhD program in Law, J.D and PhD at the Scuola Sant’Anna, as professor taught Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory at the Law Faculty in Pisa since 1987 and thereafter at the University of Parma. Member of the Academic Senate and Director for almost a decade of the Department of Law & Social Studies in Parma, he was a visiting fellow at several Law Schools, including Yale, Northwestern in Chicago, and  others. He was “ F. Braudel” Professorial Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI); Invited Research Fellow at the UNSW in Sydney; “MacCormick” Fellow, at the Law School of the University of Edinburgh. For the academic year 2009-10 he was awarded the Inaugural Fellowship of the Straus Institute of Law and Justice at the New York University Law School; in 2013 he was awarded the Distinguished Global Governance Professorial Fellowship at the Schuman Center (EUI). 

In the editorial or scientific board of a number of academic journals in Italy and abroad (Law and Philosophy, the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, Krytyka Prawa, Moscow State U. Kutafin Law Review, and others), he has lectured widely throughout Italian academic venues and many countries, including the United States, the UK, Russia, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Spain, and so forth. 

His first steps as an author focussed upon the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, thereafter the legal theory of the Scottish empiricism (David Hume). He has published extensively, in books and international refereed journals  in legal theory, constitutional law and democracy, theory of rights, the rule of law, global governance. He authored some ten books, some of them translated in other languages (Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese) of which in the last years L’autorità dei diritti (Laterza, 2002);  Dopo la certezza. Il diritto in equilibrio tra giustizia e democrazia( Dedalo 2006), E’ possibile una legalità globale? Il Rule of Law e la Governance del mondo (Il Mulino 2012),La politica come limite al diritto? Contrasti normativi oltre lo Stato(ESI 2018); and edited three collections, on Re-locating the Rule of law (with N. Walker, Hart, Oxford 2009); The Rule of Law: Internal and External Issues (with L. Morlino, Brill, Leiden 2010); The Challenge of Inter-legality (with Jan Klabbers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2019).

Along with his background research on the rule of law and fundamental rights, his latest scientific projects relate to regulation of environmental sustainability, the protection of rights and access to justice, the authoritarian undermining of the rule of law, the theory of law as challenged by the intertwined character of transnational normative legalities (inter-legality).