This chapter discusses the lack of transnational legal activity between Italian authorities competent to make decisions on international protection and their European counterparts. It also explains some of the reasons for this lack of traffic in legal ideas. Initially, the chapter considers the general framework of Italian legal thinking as one of the best examples of ‘closed’ civil law systems. The development of the institutional framework of asylum and refugee law in Italy is then analysed with the aim of identifying further key ‘rational’ reasons for the absence of cross-European use of jurisprudence by the Italian courts. The chapter next considers the sparse quantitative data available as evidence of the lack of transnational legal activity in this area of the law, before providing some ‘cultural’ explanation for this lack based on interviews with key practitioners in the field.

A brief introduction to the Italian legal mind

Italy is quintessentially a civil law country, somewhat harmoniously situated in a theoretical middle ground between France and Germany, while resolutely aware of its own centuries-long legal tradition. On one hand, much doctrinal debt is owed by Italian legal science to these two countries. For instance, the theory of the negozio giuridico (that is, the general theoretical category to which inter alia contracts and unilateral acts both belong) is of German origin (Rechtsgeschäft).