At the end of 1880 he accepted an invitation to move across to Siena, where he was installed as Extraordinary Professor of Roman Law on 18 January 1881. He was still very young, and the appointment was controversial in some quarters. The full professorship nevertheless followed on 17 November 1883. Already Scialoja was breaking out beyond the confines implied by his professorial mandate, and applying himself to some of the contemporary legal issues of the age. Pursuing the theme that he had ventilated at Camerino he continued to work away at the tensions between Positive Law and Equity. His conclusion, in summary, was that the extent of the conflict between the two had been much exaggerated. In the Roman/Italian law mindset of mainland Europe in the late nineteenth century, Equity could only be properly invoked where it could be directly translated into the provisions of the legal systems. It enjoyed no stand-alone status as some kind of an ethical dictate to be applied according to judicial whim. The theme was one which he continued to develop during the decades that followed, and should on no account be viewed simply as traditionalist one-sided legalism. It should be viewed, rather, in the context of the perceived extreme institutional fragility of the newly created Italian state, and the range of powerful "disintegrating forces" that challenged, along with the cohesion of the state, the 1865 "Codice civile" itself. After 1922 some of the dangers inherent in the scope for interpretation implicit in the "Equity"-driven approach became all too clear. Scialoja's voice was raised not in opposition to "equità comune", expressive of a shared popular aspiration in favour of a certain "common sense" justice, and a will that reaches a level of intensity deserving recognition through a force external to the legal code. The dangers came, rather, from the risk of an overmighty legislature finding ways to use the doctrine on Equity to thwart judicial independence.
