Historian of Roman law, he was born in Taranto in 1931.
Professor of Institutions of Roman Law at the University of Bari and History of Roman law at the “Federico II” of Naples, where he served as dean of the Faculty of Law.
Judge of the Constitutional Court from February 1986, he was the President from 1992 to 1995. In 1993-94 he was a member of the Arbitration Commission for former Yugoslavia.
From 1996 to 1998 he was a guarantor for the publishing and broadcasting.
A member of several academies and scientific societies, he was president of the Italian-Treccani (March 1998 – February 2009) and from December 2006 to October 2015 he was president of the National Bioethics Committee.
In his research, initially addressed to the identification of late ancient roots of legal institutions and ideas that in the centuries have established themselves in the European world, he has developed its own direct method of investigation in order to reconstruct the historical life of an institution in his time and then in the projection known in Roman tradition and doctrinal in Europe.
He later dealt with, among other research topics, the history of thought of the Roman jurists, studies on the Late Roman law and investigations on the Italian legal history. He was convinced that the constitutive form of the Western legal civilization consists in the permanence of the legacy of the Roman law, understood as a corpus of logical and ethical values principles, Casavola has emphasized the invaluable contribution of historical culture to the formation of the modern jurist.
Among his major works: Studi sulle azioni popolari romane (1958); Lex Cincia. Contributo alla storia della donazione romana (1960); Actio petitio persecutio (1965); the essays collected in the Volume Giuristi adrianei of 1980 (later published in Spanish); Diritto romano, scienza giuridica e formazione del giurista (1989); F. De Martino storico (1990); L’educazione del giurista tra memoria e ragione (1991); Diritto romano e diritto europeo (1994) ; La formazione del giurista oggi (1998); the three volumes Sententia legum tra mondo antico e moderno (2000-2004); Dal diritto romano al diritto europeo (2006); Ritratti italiani: individualità e civiltà nazionale tra XVIII e XXI secolo (2010).