Following in the footsteps of Ginsburg&Versteeg. The bound executive during the pandemic: Italy as a case study

The paper compares the findings of a recent comparative law study (Tom Ginsburg and Mila Versteeg, The bound executive: Emergency powers during the pandemic, in I•CON 19, no. 5 (2021), 1498–1535) about the impact of the pandemic on the guarantees available under constitutional law with the most recent developments in relation to a specific national legal system, that of Italy, which for various reasons appears to be particularly significant. Experiences in Italy largely confirm the hypothesis advanced by Ginsburg&Versteeg. Despite being centrally involved in the policy choices to combat the pandemic, the Italian Executive was not entirely unbound in terms of its action, but on the contrary came up against solid democratic constraints not only in the form of the reaction by an independent and non-deferential judiciary, but also through largely efficient parliamentary oversight procedures. However, in contrast to the argument proposed by Ginsburg&Versteeg, Italian regional and local authorities did not operate as a real constraint on the national Executive, as Italy’s small geographical size and the global scale of the threat to health made it reasonably advisable to centralise decision making to combat the virus. In conclusion, the paper argue that Italy proved to lack almost entirely the necessary democratic antibodies only vis-a-vis the technical-scientific power, which should also have been contained and controlled into the system of checks and balances aimed at guaranteeing individual rights.