Foreign precedents in constitutional litigation. The Italian Constitutional Court and Comparative Law: A Tale of Two Courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reference to foreign precedents by Constitutional Courts varies steadily across countries. Countries can be divided into two broad groups, a divide following closely the common/civil law divide. While in countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel and South Africa, the use of foreign law is widespread, in the second group (comprising Austria, Germany, Hungary, Russia, as well Belgium, France and Spain), such use is much more rare. The few studies conducted about the Italian Constitutional Court suggest it falls without any doubt in the second group. But where exactly in the spectrum of possible types of «use» of comparative law?The empirical research conducted in this survey suggests that the «much ado about nothing» approach adopted in the past to frame the use of foreign law by the Italian Constitutional Court must be questioned. On the one hand, the “explicit” reference to foreign law, albeit being still rare, has improved from a “quality” point of view: the most recent judgments referring to foreign law are often based on a broader legal reasoning than in the past and refer to some of the most relevant issues brought in front of the Court. On the other hand, there is a «second tale» - the one of the «hidden» influence of foreign law on the Italian Constitution - which has not been told yet. This survey tries to open this field of research, examining two sets of data from which one can infer such «underlying» influence: the cases in which foreign law is quoted by the parties, as an argument to persuade the Court, and the cases for which a specific Comparative Law Department established within the Court prepared comparative law dossiers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".