The Court’s most important task is the review of the constitutionality of the laws and other legislative acts of the State, as well as of the laws enacted by territorial communities such as the Regions and the Autonomous Provinces of Trento and Bolzano. The decisions adopted by the Court are judgements (sentenze) and orders (ordinanze). From 1956 to date, the Court has published approximately 20,000 decisions, all of which are available on the Court’s official website. In 2012, the Court decided to make the documents held in its archives available for re-use and for any purpose, starting with its decisions. The decisions were initially published in an open format (XML), which was already being used for publication on the Italian Official Journal and, later, in JSON and CSV formats. The data contained in the digitized document are ready for re-use through an open license (Creative Commons), which grants broad rights to re-use and guarantees the non-alteration of the document and acknowledgement of the source.
In 2010, the EU Council Conclusions established the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI). The univocal identifier (the ECLI) can be used for the decisions issued by all courts within the European Union and other European organizations (of the Council of Europe and of the European Union) to make European law and Member states’ case law available to national judges, legal professionals and citizens. At the end of 2016, the Constitutional Court adopted the ECLI: all of its decisions published since 1956 (which, as mentioned above, amount to approximately 20,000) are provided with an identifier having the following format: ECLI:IT:COST: YEAR of the decision: NUMBER of the decision.
In addition, compulsory metadata are available (among which, creator, coverage, date, language). The English translation of the decision, when issued, is also made available via the ECLI search engine.
Related Session:
October 12th, 2018
Session IV. Open Judicial Data and Case Law Publication
9:30-11:30
Aula Magna of the Rectorate of the University of Florence