Fundamental rights protection and judicial reasoning of the Italian Constitutional Court: opening up to supranational models through the proportionality test and the use of comparative arguments

In the current stage of Italian Constitutional justice, the guardian of the Constitution has evolved into a highly interventionist political actor, thereby reshaping some of its traditional procedural standards. By focus-ing on recent case law and the Court’s reasoning, this paper aims to high-light how the Court’s conduct seems to show the intention to reconsider the constitutive elements of its decision-making style without renouncing a jurisdictional modus operandi. In this perspective, we will examine how the Court is now part of a well-established transnational judiciary network, which has contributed to building a permanent and mutually en-riching dialogue between different constitutional systems and judicial models. In particular, the use of the proportionality test, which is the cornerstone of the protection of constitutionally protected rights in global neo-constitutionalism, as well as the increasing use of comparative argu-ments, both play a significant role. This rhetorical strategy is now fre-quently used not only with the aim of homogenizing and increasing fun-damental rights protection, but to support the utilization of sophisticated judicial solutions implemented by European counterparts.