Dialogues on Italian Constitutional Justice. A comparative Perspective

The Italian Constitutional Court represents one of the earliest, strongest, and most successful examples of constitutional judicial review established in the last century. Following its delayed implementation in 1956, eight years after the Constitution of the Italian Republic entered into force, the Court immediately took up a strong position among the other Italian political institutions and ever since then it has always been well respected at the domestic level. Beyond national borders, together with the Constitutional Court of Germany, it has served as an important forerunner of the “post-war paradigm” and one of the principal prototypes for later constitutional tribunals in other parts of Europe, from Spain and Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s, to Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist regimes in the 1990s, to the more recent reform of the French Conseil Constitutionnel in 2008.