Tiberio Deciani or Decianus (1509–1582) was an Italian

jurist A jurist is a person with expert knowledge of law; someone who analyses and comments on law. This person is usually a specialist legal scholar, mostly (but not always) with a formal qualification in law and often a legal practitioner. In the Uni ...

working in the tradition of

Renaissance humanism Renaissance humanism was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term ''humanist'' ( it, umanista) referred to teache ...

. Born in

Udine Udine ( , ; fur, Udin; la, Utinum) is a city and ''comune'' in north-eastern Italy, in the middle of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, between the Adriatic Sea and the Alps (''Alpi Carniche''). Its population was 100,514 in 2012, 176,000 with t ...

, Deciani studied the

humaniora Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time ...

and then law in

Padua Padua ( ; it, Padova ; vec, Pàdova) is a city and ''comune'' in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the ...

, where he attained a doctorate in 1529. He practiced law in Udine and became a member of the city council. In 1544, he moved his practice to

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

, and in 1547 he began to teach law at Padua. Deciani's work was innovative in several fields that were at his time sparsely developed because they were outside the scope of the ''

ius commune ''Jus commune'' or ''ius commune'' is Latin for "common law" in certain jurisdictions. It is often used by civil law jurists to refer to those aspects of the civil law system's invariant legal principles, sometimes called "the law of the land" i ...

'' tradition. His most pioneering work was in

criminal law Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It prescribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and moral welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law i ...

. In his ''Tractatus criminalis'' (published posthumously 1590), he was the first author to discuss general principles of criminal law, i.e. matters beyond the treatment of individual crimes and stages of procedure. Notably, it includes the first formulation of the concepts of the objective and subjective constituent elements of a criminal act. These notions are, in the

common law In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omnipresen ...

tradition, roughly equivalent to the

criminal elements Under United States law, an element of a crime (or element of an offense) is one of a set of facts that must all be proven to convict a defendant of a crime. Before a court finds a defendant guilty of a criminal offense, the prosecution must presen ...

Works

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References

External links

* Italian Renaissance humanists 16th-century Latin-language writers 16th-century Italian writers 16th-century male writers 16th-century Italian jurists 1509 births 1582 deaths {{Italy-law-bio-stub