The judge, the lawyers and the crowd. Public uproar in Gravina on Michaelmas (1886) in a sentence passed by the Court of Bari (1887)

A judge (the sentence of the Court of Bari) and two lawyers (G. A. Pugliese and C. Ricco) interpret one specific 'deed', a 'riot' within the framework of the 'social issue'. Their importance is not only in having laid out the problem of 'collective crime' in relation to the problem of the 'right to resistance' at a time that was crucial for discussions on political disagreement and criminal law in Italy from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries (Sbriccoli), but also in having supplied decisive materials for the elaboration of theories on the 'delinquent crowd' by another type of interpreter: the crowd psychologists. The deed, the judge's sentence and the lawyers' writings formed in fact a fundamental starting point for the 'Essay on Collective Psychology' in the work The Delinquent Crowd by Scipio Sighele (1891).