Exploring the functioning of Italian courts of justice

The repeated recalls at international level and the continuous mistrust of foreign investors have marked Italy as “the Country with infinite judicial processes”. According to the data of European Court of Human Rights, Italy, in the last few years, suffered about two thousands verdicts of guilty by the court for the infringement of the article 6 of the Roma’s Convention about the respect of a reasonable term for judicial cases resolution. The continuous stream of legislative innovations has already largely shown the substantial impotence to modify in a meaningful way the performances and the Italian justice’s productivity. On the bases of an ethnographic research developed in four Italian courts, this paper wants to reflect about the functioning of the Italian justice. The main objective of this research is on one side to describe the concrete operation of a court of justice, and on the other side to signal the discrepancies between “formal” organization, institutionally sanctioned, and “real” organization, constructed through everyday practices of the actors inserted in the context of interaction of a judicial office. The courts of justice are institutions impenetrable from “outside”. Beside the formal announcements, that establish the institutional context, it is fundamental to study how a court concretely works in the everyday reality. This paper intends to trace the functioning of the Italian courts of justice. These reflections want to represent an “humus” for discuss about the processes of creation and sharing of knowledge in legal context and an occasion for debate about the distance between "formal law" and practices of actors interacting in a court of justice.