‘BOTH LEX SPORTIVA AND LEX MERCATORIA ARE POSITIVE LAW, BUT NOT MADE BY THE STATE’ Interview with Alberto Mazzoni DOI: 10.17803/2313-5395.2015.2.4.371-373 he Kutafi n University Law Review (KULawR) representatives followed attentively the lively discussion on the topic of ‘Moral Foundations and Natural Law’ that took place within the V St. Petersburg International Legal Forum on May 28, 2015. <...> It brought together a number of prominent speakers. <...> One of them was Mr Alberto Mazzoni, President of the International Institute for the Unifi cation of Private Law (UNIDROIT). <...> T — Mr Mazzoni, today in your speech you preferred to focus on the actual interplay between positive law as State law and non-State rules of law, as you call it. <...> Traditionally most of the Russian lawyers are used to think that law is the exclusive product of States. <...> Can we characterize the second part of your dichotomy as non-State normative rules? — For those who believe, as I do, that law can be created either through spontaneous self-regulation by a community based on shared social needs or by general recognition and observance of good intrinsic rules proposed by a non-State institution, the issue of non-State normative rules is strictly and necessarily a pure de facto issue: a non-State rule is normative not because it stems from a particularly authoritative nonState source, but because it acquires the status of law through actual observance or through its ability to influence and to supplement already existing law. <...> Observance and prestige based on rational persuasiveness much more than enforcement through coercion or nobility of the issuing (nonState) source are the tests that I would consider appropriate for the purpose of determining which non-State rules are normative rules. <...> Volume 2 October 2015 Issue 2(4) www.kulawr.ru 372 KUTAFIN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW — While making a speech today you differentiated between lex as a set of rules formulated in a specifi c statute and jus as a legal system in general. <...> In Russian we also differentiate between ‘zakon’ that is equivalent to ‘a statute’ and ‘pravo’ that stands for general law. — Really? <...> It is of course very interesting and confirmatory of the broad commonality of certain basic ideas about the law. — As far <...>