Il dialogo tra giudici nello spazio costituzionale europeo

This dissertation provides an analysis of judges’ and, more generally, jurists’ language and reasoning on a specific topic: the judicial dialogue in the European constitutional space. “European constitutional space” is an expression which concisely denotes the idea, increasingly popular with European legal culture, of different legal orders conceptualized as open towards one another, interdependent, and capable of confrontation as well as conflict. Within this European constitutional space, the idea of a “dialogue” occurring between the European Union’s Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the domestic judicial authorities (especially in the matter of fundamental rights) is equally popular among European jurists. More precisely, this analysis aims at clarifying which phenomena the legal culture claims this dialogue describes and which problems it claims it can solve: essentially, why the legal culture has felt the impulse to resort to the idea of an on-going dialogue between European judges. The investigation into the rise of a (now) well-established topos in European constitutional legal literature will be carried out on the basis of jurists’ interpretive and constructive trends, explicitly or implicitly relating to this idea of a dialogue between judges. The research is organized and divided into three different parts. The first part, which corresponds to the first chapter, is dedicated to a general, albeit brief, review of the different legal fields where the concept of dialogue is used (or has been used). This operation allows to draw some distinction between different forms of “dialogue”, such as a judicial dialogue within the legal order, a transnational judicial dialogue, and, lastly, a judicial dialogue in the European constitutional order. The second part, which is the core of the analysis, consists of three chapters. The first one deals with the relationship between the European Union’s Court of Justice and the Italian domestic judicial authorities (mainly the Italian Constitutional Court); the second one addresses the relationship between the European Court of Human Rights and the Italian domestic judicial authorities (mainly the Italian Constitutional Court); the last one concerns itself with the relationship between the European Union’s Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. The third and final part aims to provide some conclusive remarks on the judicial dialogue in the European constitutional space, on the basis of the analysis carried out in the second part of this dissertation.