Abstract (in inglese)
Starting from recent events that originated a reflection on the need to reform the Italian High
Council for Justice, the article reflects from a constitutional and comparative perspective on the
appointment of court presidents and chief prosecutors. Its objective is twofold: on the one hand, it
aims at better understanding the problems that emerged from the above-mentioned events; from a
more general perspective, it aims at highlighting issues relating to the procedures for appointments
at such positions. In its first part, the article reflects upon the growing importance of judicial
leadership roles and the need to qualify it. A distinction is made between the general phenomenon
of the expansion of the relevant functions and the issues related to the power that court presidents
and chief prosecutors exercise inside and outside the judicial system. This first allows to underline
that appointment is politically sensitive in Italy with special regard to the role of chief prosecutor. In
the second part, it focuses on the discretionary nature of appointments of court presidents and chief
prosecutors, in order to emphasize the decline of the seniority criterion and the need to problematize
the question in terms of readability, comprehensibility and adequacy of inevitably discretionary
choices.
