The book by Carlo Nitsch Il giudice e la legge (2013) provides an illuminating reconstruction of the debate on the law-judge relationship, and still more in general on the relationship between law and philosophy, in the first half of the Twentieth Century. This paper, discussed in April 2013 at the Faculty of Law of the Federico II University of Naples with Pietro Rescigno and Baldo Pastore strives to place such a reconstruction in a broader and more updated context: the rise, fall and transfiguration of the value of legality in Italian Twentieth Century Culture.