Happy Birthday, Constitution!
Italy - 1948-2008 -
Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Jurisprudence of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”
The author gives a brief account of the Italian constitutional evolution since the entry into force of the 1948 Constitution of the Republic. After having mentioned the main points of the debate occurring at the Constituent Assembly, the author recalls the difficulties characterizing the Constitution’s legislative enforcement during the first decades of the Republic, and the crucial role of the Constitutional Court since its first decision (n. 1/1956), in affirming the legally binding force of all constitutional provisions. Attention is then drawn on the Constitution’s impact on diverse legal sectors such as civil, criminal, labor and administrative law, which is deemed dependent on continuous processes of interpretation and adaptation of the text to circumstances which the Framers could not usually foresee. In the author’s view, these processes strenghtened the Constitution’s legitimacy at large, but at the same time were removed from the developments occurring in the political arena, where the mobilizing effects of the Constitution’s enforcement and of the Resistenza against fascism ended, respectively, with the approval of the laws deemed to put into practice the First Part’s principles and with the passage of generations. According to the author, hence derives the following dilemma. On the one hand, the 1948 Constitution has demonstrated an enduring capacity of orienting political, economic and social developments of the country, including those affecting citizens’ ordinary life. On the other hand, these achievements are well known only within the cercle of lawyers and the Constitution appears to the greatest part of the population too remote from its needs and feelings, if not being wholly ignored. The distance between ‘the Constitution of lawyers’ and ‘the Constitution of the people’, although partly inevitable, appears thus particularly deep and troublesome for the Italian 1948 Constitution’s future.
