“The underage mother who has to go through the procedure of partner succession for her child is fragile … A person who underwent a Tso (compulsory medical treatment) many years ago, when he was a boy, and now lives in terror that it happens again, is fragile, asking an “official document” to the notary to protect him from being subjected to electroconvulsive therapy again … The elderly person who is not completely present to himself is fragile, dragged in front of the notary by his sister to sell the house he lives in … The boy is fragile Asperger with multiple degrees and genius who would like to donate a property but who does not know how to value money and spends everything he has on rubber slippers … The very famous person, advanced in age, whom his son tries several times (and end obtains) to incapacitate for the sole evident purpose of preserving the assets in view of the inheritance succession.
Each of us can be fragile at a certain moment in life, due to problems related to a pathology, an addiction, a bereavement, a love that has gone badly, the loss of a job or economic security, being subjected to psychological violence, social exclusion at age. The journey of life is full of scars ».
The cure of fragility: the innovation of existential damage
Care and fragility. Treatment of frailty. Caution. Listening to needs with an idea of ”law from below” that is capable of descending into the victim’s life, into daily experience, into the network of relationships and occupations in order to concretely grasp the repercussions of damage suffered. This is the common thread of the life and work of Paolo Cendon, one of the few great Italian specialists in civil liability. The book “The world of Paolo Cendon” published by Santelli (AA.VV., Santelli Editore, 2022, pp. 332, € 15.99), written in several voices, gradually unravels this file rouge and it brings out the jurist’s juridical, human and even literary profile (at least two novels to report, which take their cue from real cases: “The ogre in the rectory” and “History of Ina”).
And here is the Cendon of the revolution of non-pecuniary damage, first with the recognition of psychic damage as an impairment of mental integrity (the relationship existing between the injury to mental health and civil liability is the subject of the innovative work “The price of madness” already in 1984), then with the existential damage. An unprecedented category of prejudice for a new compensation model: “A prejudice of a not merely internal nature, but objectively ascertainable, caused on the subject’s areditual doing, which alters his habits of life and the relational structures that are proper to him with a negative modification of its existence “. There is talk of cases such as the injury to the life or health of a relative, an unwanted birth, the death of the pet, the infringement of the various rights of the personality.
The cure of frailty: the Copernican revolution of the support administration
But above all here is Cendon, the “Copernican revolutionary of law” who was able to unhinge the old legal system, making the gears dance “, to place the human person at the center with his needs and his daily life. The Copernican revolution is called support administration, a new institution for the frail of which Cendon is the “father and mother” born after the Basaglia law which in 1978 led to the closure of the asylums. A very long battle: more than fifteen years pass from the drafting of the first reform project of the system of protection of the “incapable” to the approval of the law 9 January 2004 n.6 which establishes precisely the support administration.