Riserva di scienza e tutela della salute. L'incidenza delle valutazioni tecnico-scientifiche di ambito sanitario sulle attività legislativa e giurisdizionale

[Machine translation] When the legislator or judge are called to exercise their functions in the light of knowledge and technical-scientific evaluations, they are required to draw them from qualified sources, both in terms of competence and in terms of reliability, and they cannot rely solely on the exercise of their respective forms of discretion. This is how, in the first approximation, the essential nucleus of a principle of reserve science, based on a plurality of constitutional norms, can be understood as it emerges from an articulated jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court concerning the protection of health. From the study of this jurisprudence, which as a whole draws up a constitutionally oriented model of relations between science, law and politics, as well as between legislation, administration and jurisdiction in scientifically characterized fields, the investigation presented in this volume moves, which aims to analytically examine the constitutive principles of such a model and to discuss some of the problems underlying the events brought to the attention of the constitutional judge: from the complex condition (of awe, but also of domination) of law in the face of the need to produce science-related rules, up to the criteria that guide the various jurisdictions to the solution of controversial scientific issues, passing through the role of the technical-scientific bodies of the administration as subjects primarily (though not exclusively) responsible for the processes of validating knowledge for public purposes. The research, which also makes use of an in-depth study of two cases of “pseudomedicine” (Di Bella and Stamina) emblematic of the short circuits in which legislation and jurisdiction may occur in the presence of strong individual requests for access to scientific innovations (or presumed to be such), proposes to read the aforementioned problems within unitary coordinates and to adopt the principle of the science reserve as an ermeneutical resource able to identify satisfactory solutions from a systemic point of view, ultimately capable of balancing tension to a full and effective protection of rights with that of the certainty of the legal system.