Forms and Methods of Constitutional Interpretation - Italian Style

Abstract

The essay highlights some issues that feature prominently in the Italian debate on constitutional interpretation. To be sure, “constitutional interpretation” is not just a single issue, but rather a cluster of different and tightly interwoven issues, such as: the choice of interpretive canons that best fit the Constitution, the nature of constitutional norms, the relation between constitutional interpretation and statutory interpretation – just to mention a few. I will try to untangle at least some of these issues, and to relate them to the underlying conceptions of the Constitution at work in contemporary Italian legal culture, as well as to similar debates in other countries.

Keywords: interpretation, constitutional interpretation, interpretive methodologies