Francesco Palermo

The Foreign Policy of Italian Regions: Not Much Ado About Something?

What does regional external power mean? To what extent is it allowed? What are the limits for its exercise? And how is it carried out in todays quasi-federal Italy? Not only is regional foreign policy a litmus test for the legal development of a compound system; it is also extremely telling as far as the political maturity of the actors in a multi-level governmental system is concerned. In the present constitutional and political framework in Italy, there is a cleavage between the rather developed normative framework and the immature practical reality. Regional foreign policy is something very important about which too little ado is made.

Regional Dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe

This book presents a contemporary broad assessment of the main dilemmas of regional development and regional policy in Central and Eastern Europe considering the influence of internal and external pressures on the regionalization process in this area.

Environmental Protection in Multi-Layered Systems

The book aims at understanding the current distribution and use of powers over the environment among various layers of government and their consequences on environmental protection, comparing federal, regional and unitary State models and drawing theoretical and practical consequences.

Globalization, Technologies and Legal Revolution

The essays collected in the book look beyond the traditional academic horizon which was too tight and narrow for Professor Ortino’s innate search for new challenges, new disciplines and cross-disciplinary inputs. This ample look was always important for Professor Ortino in order to deepen the knowledge in fields that are essential to better understand the most profound reasons of legal phenomena and their evolution. This is why he could explain legal developments long before others. All his work, especially in the last twenty years of his extraordinary career, shows how foresighted he was in his research. He wrote about globalization long before this fundamental issue became “fashionable” and analyzed by legal scholars.

Creating, Studying and Experimenting with Bilingual Law in South Tyrol: Lost in Interpretation?

The aim of this book is to document the experiences of institutions and states that are implementing bilingual higher education policies in the legal context, to identify the different approaches and to suggest some of the likely areas for future theoretical development. It examines the role of higher education language policies (medium-of-instruction policies in higher education) in mediating the tension between on the one hand the centralizing forces of stated-mandated policies and globalisation and demands for language rights by ethnic and linguistic minorities on the other.

Back to Government? The Pluralistic Deficit in the Decisionmaking Processes and Before the Courts

“Yesterday, law was such an easy game to play....” In periods of transition, it is common for lawyers to be asked, in light of an allegedly overriding reality, to critically revisit the table of contents or categories of their discipline. In such periods it is also normal for the scientific debate of the law to be pervaded by a deep sense of uneasiness. The physiognomy of the law is, at least to a certain extent, to drive rather than to follow the evolution of reality. Accordingly, it is a symptom of pathology if reality systematically departs from rules or categories still in force. Nonetheless, law is everything but a stable artifact. Only in the easy cases does its evolution comply with the procedures that the law itself provides for its amendment. In the other cases, namely when the reality constantly deranges the rules or the legal categories and imposes itself as dominant, it is up to the science of the law to decide either if (and how) the traditional categories have to be reinforced or if (and how) they are required to be updated, accommodating the law to the reality. An example of this uneasiness emerges from the articles hereafter published as a result of a conference held at the Faculty of Law of Trento, Italy, in June 2004. The debate started from the broadly shared assumption that the performances of the traditional domestic circuits of representative democracy are increasingly challenged when a number of actors do not perceive they are properly involved in the regulatory (legislative and administrative) decisionmaking processes and before the courts. As organizers of the conference, we labeled this reality the pluralistic deficit, and we asked each of our guests to deal with this issue from the perspective of his or her highly differentiated academic background.

Italy: Autonomism, Decentralization, Federalism, or What Else?

More than a decade ago, Italy was championing the movement toward federalization, having just introduced the most significant “federalizing” constitutional reform of the western world in decades. Twelve years later, despite slow but remarkable implementation of the reform, the economic crisis that severely hit the country seems to be strangling regional autonomy and the whole federalizing process, bringing about a counter-wave of centralization.

Annex One: Questionnaire

This annex section of the book Environmental Protection in Multi Layered Systems presents guiding questionnaire for PART I (A, B, C, D) of the Book: Forms of States and Environmental Protection. It also discusses guiding questionnaire for PART II (A, B, C, D) of the Book: The Management and Protection of Water Resources. Keywords: Environmental Protection, Multi Layered Systems