Course 2017-2018 a.y.

Classes: 24 (I sem.) - 26 (I sem.)

Instructors:
Class 24: VIKTORIIA LAPA, Class 26: MARCO BASSINI

The main purpose of this course is to provide students with an advanced introduction to comparative constitutional law.

• General Introduction: sources of law, constitutions, constitutional amendments constitutional statutes, ordinary statutes, law decrees, legislative decrees and delegated legislation, bye-laws and regulations.
  
• Forms of State and Transitions to Democracy. Forms of Government. Electoral laws.
  
• Federalism, Regionalism and Devolution in a comparative context.
• Constitutional Justice: composition, role and functions of Constitutional and Supreme Courts. The fundamental aspects of American and European models of constitutional review. Classification of Court judgments and analysis of decision-making techniques.
  
• The legal system of the European Union: system of legal sources and the relationship between European law and domestic legislation; the institutional structure; the evolution of the case law of the CJEU and domestic courts.
  
• Political, economic and civil rights and related safeguards in a comparative context.
  
• Class-specific special part that shall indicated to students at the beginning of the course by the class instructor.

• The common assessment method for all classes is an end-of-term written exam consisting of 40 multiple choice questions and 1 short essay. The end-of-term exam format is the same for attending and non-attending students, but the content is different (see above). Other assessment methods for attending students are class-specific and explained in detail at the beginning of the semester.
  
• Please note that there is only one written final exam every academic year at the end of the course semester; students have to sit oral exams in all other sessions. Students from previous academic years can only sit the written or oral exam as non- attending students.

For attending students

• A workbook with articles, cases and other material is put on the Blackboard platform at the beginning of the course.
  

For non attending students

• G.F. FERRARI (ed.), Introduction to Italian Public Law, Milano, Giuffrè, 2008, all chapters.