The Italian Constitutional Court in the European space: an empirical approach

The chapter provides an empirical assessment of the position of the Italian constitutional court in the European multi-level and multi-dimensional constitutional space. Taking the year 2016 as a case study, the chapter offers a critical review of all the decisions published that year by the Italian Constitutional Court on issues related to European Union (EU) law and to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), in order to test ‘in action’ how the Italian Constitutional Court deploys its ‘relational’ style of adjudication when confronted with European law. To this purpose, the chapter starts with a brief recap of the Court’s current positions on EU and ECHR law. After some caveats about the methodology adopted, numbers and figures of the EU- and ECHR-related case law of the Italian Constitutional Court in 2016 will be analysed. A survey of some of the Court’s specific postures will follow, preceding the concluding remarks.