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The Legal Concept of the Environment in the Light of the Definition Given by the Italian Legislature. Italian legislature has provided an explicit definition of the legal concept of the «environment » by inserting it into the milestone in Italian environmental legislation, i. e. Legislative Decree 3 April 2006, no. 152 (the so-called Environmental Code). This is a valuable innovation considering the originality and complexity of the Italian legal definition. This article suggests that the social-ecological systems (SESs) model can be considered an implied conceptual framework for interpreting the legal definition of the «environment » in Italian law. According to this interpretative proposal, the environment in the legal sense cannot be reduced to ecological systems or social systems considered individually and separately, because it is a meta-system, including both social and ecological systems which interact and organize themselves into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts and has its own emergent properties. The consequences arising from this conceptual framework are significant for Environmental Law as an academic discipline. Environmental Law is a ‘federative’ law because it does neither deprive nor override other legal branches, but coordinates and integrates them into a higher and more complex level of regulation.

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