Lei e Estado Social: da legislação operária aos dilemas do welfare "sem lei"

In faced of the current European debate on the possibility of maintaining social rights in the midst of state deregulation, this article addresses the construction of such rights in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Those rights were initially guaranteed by partially public institutions. Through the analysis of commented legislative collections, the author presents perspectives of that time concerning the settlement of social legislation within Italian civil law, besides the subsequent expansion of social legislation throughout Europe.