Treves was born in Turin, Italy of a Jewish family.
According to Vincenzo Ferrari, Treves "devoted his first academic study to the diffusion of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon's (1760–1825) doctrines in Italy" before turning his attention to the neo-Kantian movement and Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law.
[citation needed] He kept faith with a Weberian and Kelsenian vision of sociology of law, as distinct from legal science.
He advocated empirical research as a means of testing theories critically and favoured open as opposed to closed social portraits of law.
Primarily, he argued in favour of a perspectivist and relativistic vision of law and society, combating all kinds of absolutism in both science and politics, from a liberal socialist stance that he upheld in many of his writings.