Access to justice, solidarity and subsidiarity in legal cliinics from the perspective of the Italian Constitution

Legal clinics are a new teaching tool in Italy that is becoming a common feature of bachelor degree programmes in law. There is no shortage of dogmatic insights exploring their extra-European roots and the adaptation of their models to the national context, highlighting the role of clinics in the construction of critical legal knowledge and in promoting rights, or identifying connections with commons theory. Still, over the years, Italian scientific literature has focused predominantly on a logic of circulating experiential knowledge regarding the content and methodologies used. In recent years, with the growing recognition of universities’ social responsibility and ministerial evaluation mechanisms of educational institutions, there has been growing interest in examining clinical experience as a unique form of expressing universities’ so-called “third mission”. In this framework, this work stands out for its unique and highly useful focus, in that it seeks to reconstruct the phenomenon of legal clinics from a gnoseological angle, by searching for bases within the most highly consecrated principles and values in the Italian Constitution. While teaching freedom, including in universities, referred to in Article 33 of the Italian Constitution may undoubtedly represent a milestone for the birth and progressive development of legal clinics in Italy, the constitutional perspective reveals other and even more significant links. First of all, with the principle of solidarity, whose propulsive and dialectic charge and whose ethical and cultural significance (before the legal one) were established in the drafting of the constituents as the basis for the very social coexistence of the newly formed Republic. In the reading proposed here, legal clinics can help give concrete expression to this principle because they involve several subjects (teachers, students, lawyers, users) who participate in a complex but mutual exchange of solidarity benefits. In its various meanings and in its growing recognition in the Constitution, the principle of subsidiarity can also find a uniquely concrete hypothesis in legal clinics because they are an autonomous initiative of individual citizens and associations working to provide activities of general interest. Specifically, clinics can usefully intervene subsidiarily to provide the disadvantaged with the means to act and defend themselves before any jurisdiction or, more generally, to pursue the interest of effectiveness and efficiency of administrative action. Lastly, even the most traditional link between clinical and objective experiences of social transformation and access to justice is given an interesting constitutional slant, considering the work of legal clinics, framed by article 24 of the Constitution, as an important tool in guaranteeing greater effectiveness of the right of individual members to take legal action, and, more broadly, the right to assert their rights. In this perspective, access to justice advocated by the constitution exceeds the narrow limits in which it is often confined and is freed from the purely judicial dimension in order to stretch toward becoming a true and proper right of "discovery", so that rights can then be exercised. Thus, the experience of legal clinics in Italy proposed here represents an important learning opportunity for every legal expert because it provides unprecedented and innovative concreteness to certain fundamental principles of our Constitution. For anyone involved in clinical teaching in the context of their own academic experience, reconsidering one’s own activities and role according to the guidelines proposed here can only stimulate us to reflect on an approach that cannot lose its ultimate meaning, not even in the toils of everyday life.