L'enigmatico statuto dei "Principi Supremi". Un'indagine empirica su limiti e «controlimiti» alle modifiche dell'ordinamento costituzionale

This PhD dissertation regards the limitations to constitutional amendments, and the limitations to constitutional changes deriving from the process of European integration. Both these two categories are often conceived under a comprehensive notion called 'supreme principles of the legal order'. The investigation of this category has been the object of vast attention by the legal scholarship, but the results of the best efforts have been significantly diverse. Moving from this fact, the dissertation applied an innovative empirical methodology to this subject, shifting the main focus on the epiphanies of the supreme principles of the legal order in the constitutional law “in action”. This route led to recognising a deep normative indeterminacy of those principles in action, and a sort of logical independence of the concept from the prescription eventually disposing the limitations to constitutional amendments of changes. The next step consisted in building a re-constructive hypothesis, in order to highlight the supreme principles' essential role: that of closing the circle of a constitutional State where no player has the right to say the last word.