Theory

On Thursday 16 July, in Genoa, the Court of Assize reads its judgment on the collapse of the Morandi bridge: 43 dead. An essay by Luca Santa Maria, dedicated to Federico Stella, on the style with which the defences of the powerful are built.

Italy is a land of industrial disasters, and yet corporate crimes remain "anonymous": little studied, little perceived, little prosecuted. Claudia Marcolungo, lecturer in Environmental Law at the University of Padua, picks up the thread of the counter-manifesto and tackles a theme that has remained below the surface: corporate anonymity.

A counter-manifesto on the Moretti case. On 2 July 2026, in la Repubblica and Il Sole 24 Ore, a paid page appeared in defence of a citizen who is never named, and whom everyone recognises. We reply.

In Taranto the "State that lets it happen" has a more naked face than elsewhere: it does not merely fail to see, it legislates so as not to stop. A recent essay reads the Ilva case with the tools of the criminology of the crimes of the powerful — and shows how the law became the site of the symbiosis between State and business, and harm to health a thing that was, for years, perfectly legal.

In the United States corporate crime has a science that studies it as an empiricist would: it observes its organisation, measures its harm in the field, and derives from it templates that help the judge to read the facts. We follow it along two threads — environmental crimes and international corruption — to their common knot, the State that lets it happen, and up to the present day: because both subjects follow the political wind, and today that wind is blowing backwards.