LE RADICI STORICO-DOGMATICHE DELL’OFFERTA AL PUBBLICO. ALLA RISCOPERTA DELL’ART. 1336 C.C.

Modern literature on the offer to the public usually overlooks the diachronic profile of the concept. In the current view, the introduction of art. 1336 in the ’42 Code, where the Pisanelli Code was silent, is assumed to be the real starting point of the legal “history” of the figure. This approach matches the tendency to favor exegetical reasoning and to re-duce the normative value of the rule, which is thus described as redundant or at most of subsidiary relevance. Starting from the analysis of the German and Italian literature that flourished between the 19th and 20th centuries, the essay therefore attempts to conceptualise a ‘historically oriented’ reading of art. 1336(1) as the provision that can introduce an objective qualification criterion referring exclusively to the case of the offer to the public, and to sketch an outline of the possible hermeneutical and systematic developments of a future research.