The present text is the speech given due to the inaugural conference of the first Congress of the Spanish Society of the History of Law.Its objective is to contextualize and characterize the two distinct moments of legal development in the Italian peninsula, namely the modernity inherited from the French Revolution and the post-modernity of the interwar period.For such, it addresses the Italian legal modernity as the rule of statism and legalism, a moment in which the bourgeoisie intended to control all social reality through the monopoly of legal production and its separation from the people, i.e., a search for a codified and abstract law, supposedly clear, coherent and secure.Then, in contrast to this legal absolutism, Italian postmodern law emerged, born during the First World War and materialized in the postwar Constitution of 1948, whose peculiarities are its facticity and plurality, i.e., a spontaneous law which germinates and organizes itself from the very society in which it is inserted, culminating in the promulgation of social rights.The speech concludes that postmodern rights have, increasingly, become fundamental values of both the Italian Republic and State.