Administrative Trial

In the Italian legal system – a constitutional State that has emerged from the ferocious totalitarianisms of the 20th century – access to judges is filtered by a control of worthiness that is based on indeterminate concepts, namely variable and personal tables of values. It is therefore possible – necessary, perhaps – to use the paradigm of legitimacy to argue for a broadening of access. It is necessary to loosen, if not quite sever, the hitherto tight and suffocating bond between the proximity of the subject to the physical place where the administrative decision impacts, and the actionability of the claim. There is a minimum objective, recently framed by the Plenary Assembly of the Council of State: to understand vicinitas in terms of contiguity that is no longer only material, but also axiological. And then a more ambitious one: to “de-subjectivise” the claim, to the point of configuring trans-subjective rights, that is, “without master”.

In recent years, the Italian system of judicial protection against public administration has undergone important transformations. Some are connected to the pandemic emergency. Others concern the need to optimize the ability of administrative judges to decide disputes. This contribution underlines how these experiments are a symptom of wider-ranging changes. In particular, these are changes in which the importance of specific organizational factors and the renewal of technical skills suitable for supporting the activity of the judge emerge as determining elements.

The article aims to explore the role of oral hearing in Slovenian and Italian administrative procedural law. In both countries the oral hearing is a pivotal moment in the judicial review of administrative decisions. The study aims to identify common elements in each system to determine a unitary content of oral hearing as a human right.

The article deals with the administrative procedures for the exercise of "golden powers" by the government and the related judicial review. More specifically, such judicial review must take into account, on the one hand, the protection of national interests and, on the other, the observance of the principle of legality: the latter with particular regard to the identification of the conditions on which the exercise of such powers is based. The parameters on which judicial review is based are the principle of proportionality and respect for procedural guarantees.

The contribution addresses the issue of access to justice, in the perspective of the sustainable development goal 16 of the United Nations. After a brief analysis of the territorial organization of Italian administrative justice, the author focuses on the innovations of the electronic administrative trial to assess to what extent it has facilitated access to justice. The contribution therefore evaluates what limits still exist in the electronic administrative trial in the perspective of reducing distances and, on the basis of these considerations, makes some proposals to mitigate the problem of excessive length of the trials.

During the Covid emergency, the importance of the collection of quality public data, their re-elaboration for information purposes and their timely dissemination emerged . This contribution analyzes the judicial actions promoted by Codacons in order to solicit the release of data, and so, in particular, the presidential decrees nos. 2299/2020 and 2346/2020 of the T.A.R. Lazio and n. 01841/2020 of the Council of State.