Stefania Ninatti

is an Associate Professor of Italian and European Public Law at the University of Turin, School of Economics.

Stefania Ninatti is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Turin, School of Economics, where she teaches Italian and European Public Law. She received a J.S.D. in Constitutional Law from the University of Milan, School of Law, and has been trained in Germany and United States. Before joining the School of Economics in Turin, she worked at the University of Milan, where she still holds a class of Human Rights as a Visiting Professor (as from 2005).

Her research interests fall broadly in the field of developments in the area of European integration and constitutional questions concerning the reality and juridical meaning of a supranational framework. Her main interests lie in theories of democracy and the democratic principle in case law, and she is the author of two books on European and Italian democracy. Moreover, she has published studies in many different fields of constitutional, comparative and European Union law.

Research Project

The 'Guardian of the Constitution' and Foreign Law: A Matter of Interpretation?

During her time at the Jean Monnet Center, Professor Ninatti will focus her research on comparative reasoning in constitutional adjudication. The main goal of the present research is to provide an organic framework for the broad constitutional discussion concerning the value of looking abroad when interpreting the constitution and the proper role of constitutional adjudication in such process; to develop a systematic articulation able to better account for the profound process of constitutional transformation, due to political changes that have been carried out during the last twenty years by the courts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg in Europe, as well the consequences of markets globalization and the new dynamics that developed accordingly. Legal traditions can nowadays travel freely as goods and information, and the constitutional judge has to tune up its instruments to face such profound and epochal change. From this point of view, we would like also give new input to the discussion on the nature of constitutional adjudication and useful modifications in such process. Nowadays constitutional adjudication is becoming a means of cross-jurisdictional dialogue and encounter of different constitutional experiences, and in order to investigate such crucial change thoroughly, we would like to focus our research on the role of a Supreme Court and, more precisely, on the nature and structure of the constitutional adjudication within the framework of present constitutionalism. The American experience in this field will be used in order to shed light on recent developments in European constitutionalism and in order to single out the sui generis character of the European Court of Justice.