Francesco Carrara

Francesco Carrara was a nineteenth-century Italian jurist and liberal politician who became one of Europe's most influential scholars of criminal law and a leading advocate for abolishing capital punishment. He earned his doctorate at the University of Lucca and taught criminal law there and later at the University of Pisa, where he wrote his ten-volume Programma del corso di diritto criminale, a comprehensive synthesis of Italian criminal law thought since Cesare Beccaria that gained wide international recognition. After Italian unification he served in parliament and sat on the commission that produced Italy's 1889 penal code, known as the Zanardelli Code. Carrara's work is regarded as the founding statement of the classical school of Italian criminal law.