The course aims to address the development of current European and non-European rights from a historical and comparative perspective, starting from an in-depth study of the Roman legal experience with a view to reconstructing both the foundations underlying the evolution of the mechanisms for the formation and interpretation of norms and the configuration of legal models and institutions in the private sphere. This is with the aim of providing the positive jurist with the necessary tools for the approach to current issues of law; among which tools, the enhancement of the student's critical capacity, aimed at observing the current private law’s conceptual framework, takes on particular importance, in order to understand the specificities and common elements of the legal systems, particularly civil law and common law under study, and to foster the dialectic between scholars and legal practitioners in the key of unification of European law.