On the Virtues of the Judge: the Judicial Model in Muratori

This article aims to provide an account of the model of judge that Ludovico Muratori devised in Dei difetti della giurisprudenza (1742). Muratori's normative model, concerned with the mental qualities and moral virtues that the judge must attain, echoes and re-elaborates different elements of the preceding tradition of the virtuous judge, and it also contains sundry intuitions that are present in current investigations about Judicial deontology and Legal epistemology. The complexity of such considerations has been significantly overlooked both by historiographers and critics.