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The foundation of the pluralistic model is usually referred to the thought of Santi Romano and, in particular, to the theses developed in his main work, The Legal Order. The elaboration of the concept of institution, and its contextual identification with the idea of “order”, allowed, on the one hand, the overcoming of the legalistic conception - which conceived law as an expressive “form” of the will of the State - and, on the other hand, the valorization of the social and, therefore, intrinsically plural nature of the law. Moreover, these assumptions call into question some of the bulwarks of legal thinking with a “normative” matrix: the voluntary nature of law, the centrality of the sanction in defining the norm, the exclusivity of the legal order. In this paper, after outlining Romano’s definition of “institution” and the cultural milieu in which it was developed, some corollaries related to it and the heuristic validity that they exhibit in today’s legal debate are examined. In reference to international law, in particular, Santi Romano intuited some guidelines of the consequent developments and the paradigmatic nodes of the interaction between the legal systems. Although it re-emphasizes the hegemonic vocation on the making of law, Romano still remains a theorist of the State, whose centrality defends even in front of the “crisis” that clearly threatens on the horizon. The “double face” of Santi Romano, i.e. the tension between pluralism and statism that animates his thought is, still today, an intellectual legacy we can use to brighten the legal reality of our time, marked by the decline of dichotomy monism / dualism, resilience of the State and, at the same time, the emergence of multiple and totally new regulatory institutions.
