This book aims to present the evolution of Italian administrative law in the context of the European Union. The chapters provide an overview of Italian administrative law, focusing on the main changes that have occurred in recent decades.
At the origin of the volume, there is the editors’ intenti...
This book aims to present the evolution of Italian administrative law in the context of the European Union. The chapters provide an overview of Italian administrative law, focusing on the main changes that have occurred in recent decades.
At the origin of the volume, there is the editors’ intention to offer foreign scholars a useful tool to understand the current characteristics of the Italian administration. For this reason, the analysis carried out is based not only on the transformations induced by national dynamics but also, and above all, on the consequences of the European integration process on national administrative law. The authors describe these transformations, with the awareness of how the events have gone elsewhere.
The time horizon of the authors was mostly the last fifty years, approximately. However major changes had been set in motion, on the one hand, by the Constitution of the Italian Republic, entered into force in 1948 (but implemented only after some years and subsequently amended) and, on the other hand, by the European Treaties, starting from the Treaty of 1957 establishing the European Economic Community.
Hence the book shows the modifications on the administrative law imposed by the Constitution and produced by the law of the European Union, mainly by way of regulations and directives and also by means of soft law. These modifications are technically analyzed and some aspects critically discussed.
However, these factors are not the only ones that have been considered in the volume. Some inherent dynamics of the law of public administration are taken also in account, particularly pertaining the relations between administrative law and private law. The evolution of the administrative justice has been thoroughly examined, as well as the expansion of regulation and the increasing legal protection of individual rights. It was necessary to consider even the novelties induced in the law of the public administrations by the growing role of technique: intended both as specialized knowledge (think, in particular, of the field of economics), and as a set of technologies capable of influencing the organization and the procedures of public administration. Finally, administrative law is inevitably conditioned by the social and economic pressures for innovation that periodically arise in our societies.
All these factors, of course, generally are not isolated, but more often they are concomitant and complementary. The chapters of the book – while maintaining a legal approach – also consider the influence of these economic, social, cultural and technological factors. That is why this book is not just a handbook of administrative law but offers an indepth analysis of the most relevant issues for the Italian public administration today.
In the first part, the book covers some general themes: the comparison between the Italian integration of the nineteenth century and the contemporary European integration; the discipline of the procedures and organization of public administrations; the public budgets; the administrative justice; the public services; the digital administration; the process of juridification.
The second part is focused on specific topics instead: the role of law in the construction of cultural identity; public intervention in the economy; regulation of the banking sector; cohesion and subsidiarity; public employment; healthcare management; civil protection; local government.
In the end the last chapters host some comments of non-Italian scholars, stimulated by the reading of previous essays.
The book shows on the whole the picture of a law largely Europeanized that however preserves meaningful national features. This, after all – not the total homologation of the law of the Member States – is to be regarded as the aim of the European Union and that is why the comparison between the law of these states can be quite interesting.
