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Biography
Dr. Andrew Cecchinato is a comparative legal historian who joined the University of Nottingham in September 2024.
Prior to his appointment at the School of Law, Andrew was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, conducting research at both the University of Michigan Law School and the University of St Andrews School of History. In this role, he served as Principal Investigator for the Horizon 2020 project John Selden's Harmonic Jurisprudence: A European Interpretation of English Legal History. Andrew began his academic career as a Research Fellow at St Andrews, where he contributed to the European Research Council-funded project Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance, Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the Late Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries.
Andrew holds a JD and a PhD in Comparative and European Legal Studies from the University of Trento in Italy, where his dissertation, The Legal Education of Thomas Jefferson, was awarded the faculty prize. Throughout his career, Andrew has received scholarships from the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. His research has also taken him to several North American institutions, including the Robbins Collection in Civil and Religious Law at the University of California, Berkeley, the Georgetown University Law Center, the George Washington University Law School, and the Library of Congress.
Expertise Summary
Andrew's scholarly interests integrate law, history, philosophy, and literature, focusing particularly on the historical development of legal science and constitutionalism across modern Europe and the Atlantic. At the Law School, Andrew teaches modules on modern English common law.
Research Summary
Two central questions guide Andrew's research.
The first question examines how jurists have remained faithful to legal thought during times when the law around them was compromised, unavailable, or collapsing. Andrew explores this theme in the context of tyranny, revolutions, and other forms of bad government, with a focus on both the modern Atlantic world and twentieth-century legal responses to totalitarianism. His first monograph, L'educazione giuridica di Thomas Jefferson [The Legal Education of Thomas Jefferson] (2021), breaks new ground by demonstrating how medieval and early modern doctrines on tyranny provided a blueprint for the Declaration of Independence and early U.S. constitutionalism. Anti-tyrannical doctrines are also central to his work on twentieth-century jurisprudence and legal historiography, particularly in his studies of Giuseppe Capograssi and Francesco Calasso.
The second concern extends the first, directing Andrew's work in a new direction. In contexts where formal legal systems have been weakened or liquidated, jurists have drawn authority from diverse sources, including sacred texts, religious commentaries, poetry, literature, and philosophical or architectural treatises. This expansive outlook has led to surprising conceptualizations, elevating law into a study of the world's entangled reality. While this theme permeates all of his work, it is most prominently explored in his ongoing research on William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and in his rediscovery of John Selden's Platonizing jurisprudence.