We generally prefer not to argue.
The law was born to act as a peacekeeper: to rationalize the conduct, foresee the consequences and, therefore, direct our actions.
When a dispute arises, the law changes its concept: specifically, it assumes the form of the procedural claim of one’s own reasons. One does not always win or lose “because one has the right”; sometimes one wins or loses because of the cleverness in using the rules of the process. In the latter case, however, it is the right that wins, with the lawyer, a clever forger of loopholes and provocations. And here one sees the intrigue between form and substance, which feeds the most learned legal discussions.
In the practice of law, there is an area in which this discussion is heating up, that of strategic litigation.
Strategic litigation is an action that initiate disputes with the aim of evolving the legal system, entrusting to the altar of the trial the requests for the recognition of new rights or new principles.
In the United States, there is a debate on animal rights, asking the courts of law to consider them “legal persons and not legal things”; in Italy, action has been taken to allow the right to assisted suicide, obtaining a historic decision of the Constitutional Court; now, on everyone’s lips, there is Holland, condemned, with a sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court of Netherlands last December, for not having taken sufficient measures to combat climate change.
Every dispute is, in its own way, strategic; even challenging the award of a public tender procedure or a regulatory act is strategic. Not every dispute, however, aims at the progress of the legal system. The most cynical will doubt whether there is a plaintiff or a lawyer who is more interested in the progress of the legal system than his own interest. We, on the other hand, who are not litigious, we want to work for the process to be (some might say “back to being”) a place of growth and discovery of law, naturally fed by social needs. For this reason, we have decided to dedicate ourselves also to strategic litigation but eliminating the word “litigation”. That’s why we decided to dedicate ourselves to strategic actions, pursuing justice and fairness.