Abstract EN:

Since the beginning of the XXI century, Italian and French administrative courts have shown an increasing interest in the protection of legal certainty, which eventually culminated in the adoption of the power to modulate the temporal effects of judicial annulments, along the lines of the powers granted to the European Court of Justice by art. 264, sect. 2 T.F.E.U. An in-depth analysis of Italian and French case law revealed that several legal doctrines aimed at the preservation of unlawful administrative acts from the effects of an annulment had already been developed by domestic Courts prior to the introduction of the power to modulate their decisions, thus demonstrating a long-lasting commitment to legal certainty by the Courts.The new techniques generated different responses in the two sides of the Alps. While in France, they received general approval by legal scholars – at least initially – and their use is now widespread, in Italy they have been almost unanimously deemed in contravention of the guarantees enshrined in article 113 of the Italian Constitution. The dissertation describes and analyses the old and new techniques by which the stability of an unlawful act or of its effects are protected by Italian and French Courts, with the aim of further defining the concept of legal certainty by illustrating what is actually protected by the Court when the principle of legal certainty is acknowledged to prevail on the principle of legality. Furthermore, the dissertation focuses on the impact of these techniques on the justiciability of citizens’ rights, in France and in Italy, as a means to explain the different reception the power of modulation has had in the two Countries.