European Minimum Standards for Courts. Independence, Specialization, Efficiency. A Glance from Italy

The organisers of the Regensburg conference entrust me with the task of giving an overview of judicial independence, court specialization and efficiency in the Italian legal system, with a view to contributing to the debate on common Europe-an minimum standards for courts. According to this proposal, the following items will be covered. First of all, I will examine efficiency, namely: (a) drafting a principle of efficiency of civil pro-cedure, fit to capture the structure and purpose of judicial systems, with a view to proposing a draft principle as a contribution to the discussion about common Eu-ropean minimum standards; (b) assessing the regulative impact that the principle of efficiency could have on certain problems and trends, in particular the current sit-uation of the Italian Supreme Court and its task of ensuring the uniform applica-tion of law. Turning to judicial independence, attention will be focused on the in-stitutional and procedural devices designed to ensure judicial independence in the Italian legal system, with a view to assessing, in a subsequent article, relationships and tensions between judicial independence and the use of tools for improving the performance of judicial systems (e.g. performance targets). Finally, the topic of court specialization will be examined. By contrast, a detailed treatment of the achievement of these standards insofar as they obtain to Italian ADR bodies will remain for another day. Report presented at the conference “Europäische Mindeststandards für Spruchkörper”, organised by Prof. Dr. Christoph Althammer, University of Regensburg Law School, and Prof. Dr. Matthias Weller, EBS Law School, at the University of Regensburg on 12-13 November 2015. The report is published in Germany in C. Althammer, M. Weller (eds.), Europäische Mindeststandards für Spruchkörper, Mohr-Siebeck, 2016. It is dedicated to my friend and colleague Prof. Nikolaos Klamaris, Athens. The research leading to these results has received funding in the framework of the PRIN project 2012 (2012SAM3KM) on Codification of EU Administrative Procedures, financed by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Italy (Coordinator Prof. Jacques Ziller, University of Pavia). I am very grateful to Rónán Condon, research assistant (EUI), for the language and stylistic revision and valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. All errors are mine.