Ugo Mattei

Ugo Mattei attended the Law School of the University of Turin (JD, 1983), University of California Berkeley School of Law (LLM, Fulbright Fellow, 1989), the London School of Economics, and the Faculté internationale de droit comparé, Strasbourg. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and the University of Cambridge, and a visiting professor in Oslo, Berkeley, Montpellier, and Macau. In 1997 he accepted a professorship at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law. As a lawyer and an activist, Mattei recently masterminded the Italian campaign against the privatization of water, which was successfully completed in June 2011 with a national referendum in which over 27 million Italians voted to endorse his scheme to recognize water as a common good. His highly interdisciplinary work has been published widely in many languages. »Beni comuni. Un manifesto«, which has been published in Italian in 2011 (Laterza) and in Spanish in 2013 (Editorial Trotta S.A.), provides a theoretical basis for the current wave of resistance against neoliberalism in Italy, and has reached its eighth edition in just six months. Mattei’s most recent books are »Contro riforme« (Einaudi, 2013) and »Senza proprietà non c’è libertà. Falso!« (Laterza, 2014).

[Last update: September 2015]