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National case law

Italy

This section provides you with an overview of the Italian case law, as well as a description of and links to relevant case law databases.

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Italy
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Case law online

The Italian judicial system provides information on case law on various websites.

The Supreme Court of Cassation (Corte Suprema di Cassazione), is the highest court in the Italian judicial system. Its portal is rich in content and includes two main sections.

One is dedicated to current civil and criminal cases. Access is reserved to identified and authorised lawyers participating in specific cases, in line with Italian law on data protection. Access is via a valid digital certificate attached to a smart card.

The other is the Italgiure DB system, which is accessible through the same portal. This contains millions of documents about past proceedings (mainly judgments) in both civil and criminal matters. These data are accessible free of charge to operators of the judicial system (judges, public prosecutors, court administrators) and can also be accessed by lawyers, universities and other interested parties on payment of a modest subscription fee.

Information recorded in court registries, as well as registers of case law and digital documents in computerised civil law case files, can be found online at all courts and appeal courts.

Access is granted to lawyers and court-appointed experts with strong authentication (smart card compatible with the Carta Nazionale dei Servizi) on the IT Services Portal (Portale dei Servizi Telematici).

Information recorded in the court registries of the ‘justice of the peace’ (giudice di pace) can also be found via this portal.

Anonymised information from court registry records can be viewed via this portal without authentication.

Presentation of decisions/Details

Current proceedings on authorised subjects are classified by the names of the parties or by case number, as listed in the general register of the Supreme Court or the court concerned.

Judgments on completed cases can also be found by using text searches, or searching by subject or specific details (date of the action, name of a party).

Formats

Case law documents and information are available in PDF and html formats.

Courts

Supreme Court

Information is available on the website of the Supreme Court of Cassation.

Ordinary courts

An up-to-date list of links to ordinary courts can be found on the website of the Ministry of Justice .

Further proceedings

Supreme Court

Other courts

Information available

on whether a case is ongoing

yes

yes

on the results of appeals

yes

no

on whether a decision is irrevocable

yes

yes

When an individual court or court of appeal has a website, this will frequently provide information on how to take legal action, institute proceedings or appeal against a decision.

Legal databases

  1. Italgiure DB provides access to a database containing details of numerous court decisions, in particular those of the Supreme Court. The website contains more than 35 million documents (including laws and regulations, as well as references to specialist literature).

Access to the databases is restricted, as explained above

  1. A large part of the case law of the appeal courts and and other courts is available through the IT Services Portal, as explained above.
Last update: 18/01/2022

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