ABSTRACT
The system of courts in Italy is divided into two main parts: one is the system of ordinary jurisdiction; the second includes several special jurisdictions, among which the most important is the administrative jurisdiction. The higher courts that in the Italian system create precedents do not have any power to select the cases they decide. The judgments of the Constitutional Court are regularly published in the official journal of the State, the Gazzetta Ufficiale. When a precedent is cited by judges, practitioners or scholars, the reference is often made to the massime that are extracted from the judgments of the Corte di Cassazione. From the historical point of view, the expansion of the use of precedents and case law in Italy started becoming important mainly in the area of civil law. In the last decades a large body of academic literature has been devoted in Italy to a critical analysis of the way precedents are created and used.
