Litigating Regionalism in Italy: the Constitutional Court and the Dynamics of the Territorial Constitution

The article focuses on how constitutional adjudication has unceasingly shaped the dynamics of the Italian territorial constitution. The Italian Constitutional Court has indeed favoured them through constitutional interpretation, thus allowing the regional framework to both evolve over time and adapt to changing (political, societal, economic, historic) circumstances. The article argues that the Court’s contribution to the dynamics of the territorial constitution is both substantive and procedural. Not only is it related to the distribution of powers on regional grounds, but it is also referred to how the access to the Court has been adapted so as to extend its judicial intervention in the dynamics of the Italian territorial constitution. Therefore, the article will consider three variables that have some bearing on such dynamics: how the black-letter constitution allots power between the orders of government; what rules regulate the access to the Court; the construction of both procedural and substantive rules related to judicial adjudication on federal grounds.