Emerico Amari

Emerico Amari (1810 to 1870) was an Italian jurist and a pioneer of comparative law. Born into an old noble family of Palermo, he studied law at the University of Palermo but left the bar for philosophy, publishing a criticism of Kantian thought in 1833, and he taught criminal law at Palermo from 1841 to 1848, drawing police attention with a lecture on the death penalty in 1842. A liberal opponent of the Bourbon regime, he sat in the Sicilian parliament of 1848, went to Turin as an envoy of the revolutionary government and then fled, first to Malta and later to Genoa, after the monarchy was restored in 1849. In exile he published in 1857 his main work, La Critica di una scienza delle legislazioni comparate, which treats law in the light of the philosophy of history, and in 1859 he became a teacher of that subject in Florence. He returned to Palermo in 1860 and was elected a deputy of the first Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy.