Abstract
The present contribution sets out the genesis, evolution and prospects of the Italian Yearbook of International Law (IYIL). After sketching the main stages of development from its creation to the current Volume 28, consideration is given to the dynamic scholarly and historical context which favoured the emergence of the IYIL in the 1970s. Notwithstanding several precursors, a rising number of competitors and the growing reliance on Internet-based services by international law researchers and practitioners, it is submitted that the IYIL was born out of and continues to appear as a distinctive and peculiar experience in the Italian legal publishing environment.
Riccardo Pavoni is Professor of International and European Law and member of the Board of Editors of the Italian Yearbook of International Law.
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Notes
- 1.
Capotorti died in 2002; for an overview of his contribution to international law scholarship and a full bibliography of his works, see Starace 2003. For tributes and bibliographies relating to Conforti and Ferrari Bravo, see Francioni 2016; Iovane 2015; Pisillo Mazzeschi 2016a, b; Cataldi 2017; Raimondi 2016; Nesi 2016; Sacerdoti 2015; Caggiano and Triggiani 2016. See also the various contributions in Nesi and Gargiulo 2015, and in Conforti and Ferrari Bravo 2018.
- 2.
See ‘Foreword’, (1975) 1 IYIL vii, viii.
- 3.
Ibid., vii. In the same context, the Editors made clear that contributions on European law would be considered only insofar as they dealt with aspects relevant to public international law, ibid., vii–viii.
- 4.
The thriving e-journal QIL-Questions of International Law, established in May 2014 by a group of Italian scholars, publishes prevalently in English, but it sometimes includes contributions in French. Its present editor-in-chief is Maurizio Arcari; see www.qil-qdi.org/about-us. Invariably written in English is instead The Global Community: Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence, a yearbook published since 2001 (currently by Oxford University Press) which contains doctrine, as well as summaries and excerpts of international judicial practice. As its title and the composition of its boards indicate, this publication vindicates a ‘global’ identity; however, it has a firm connection with Italy, since it was created at the University of Salerno, where it continues to be based under the general editorship of Giuliana Ziccardi Capaldo.
- 5.
de la Rasilla 2018, 137, 166.
- 6.
See further in this section.
- 7.
Ianni 1978, 358 (underscoring that ‘[i]n an undertaking of this nature dependent as it is upon translation services, infelicities of phrase and minor errors are bound to creep in’, and concluding however that ‘by and large these examples are rare’ and that ‘in this regard, Volume 2 is an improvement over Volume I’).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Capotorti 1976.
- 11.
See especially Ronzitti 1975.
- 12.
- 13.
See especially Ago 1977.
- 14.
‘Preface’, (1988–1992) 8 IYIL xi.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
In addition to Capotorti, Conforti and Ferrari Bravo, these were Antonio Cassese, Luigi Condorelli, Laura Forlati, Francesco Francioni, Giorgio Gaja, Andrea Giardina, Riccardo Luzzatto, Paolo Picone, Natalino Ronzitti, Vincenzo Starace, Antonio Tizzano, Tullio Treves and Ugo Villani.
- 18.
Plausibly, the role then played by Capotorti, Conforti and Ferrari Bravo was that of intellectual leaders, inspirators, and general supervisors of the IYIL, rather than editors-in-chief stricto sensu.
- 19.
Francioni 2016, 499.
- 20.
See Francioni 2015.
- 21.
On the introduction of a rotating system for the position of General Editor, see Sect. 17.3.
- 22.
Obviously, a key factor in this regard was Francioni’s appointment—in 2003—to the prestigious Chair of International Law and Human Rights at the European University Institute in Florence. He had previously held the Chair of International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Siena since 1980.
- 23.
Since then, I have consecutively held the positions of Assistant Editor (Vols. IX–XIV), Associate Editor (Vols. XV–XXIV), and member of the Board of Editors (from Vol. XXV on).
- 24.
Conforti, Ferrari Bravo, Ronzitti and Sacerdoti had to look after, respectively, Italian judicial decisions, diplomatic and parliamentary practice, treaty practice, and legislation.
- 25.
See e.g., ‘The ICJ Judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy: Greece Intervening)’, (2011) 21 IYIL 133, with contributions by B Conforti, R Pavoni, C Espósito and M Sossai.
- 26.
See, e.g., ‘International Law in Italian Courts: Ten Years of Jurisprudence’, (2009) 19 IYIL 1, collecting a set of contributions arising from a symposium organized at the European University Institute on 8 April 2010 by Francesco Francioni; ‘The Future of the ECHR System’, (2010) 20 IYIL 1, featuring a variety of topical pieces by leading experts—including several judges—of the law of the European Convention on Human Rights, which were first presented at a symposium organized in April 2011 by Giuseppe Cataldi at the Higher Education School of the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ in the island of Procida.
- 27.
See Sect. 17.3 for current prospects involving this part of the IYIL. Significantly, the Editors of the new series expressed their hope that a selective approach to Italian practice ‘may stimulate interest in the original sources of Italian legal culture, and, indirectly, in the Italian language itself’, see ‘Foreword’, (1999) 9 IYIL vii.
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
‘Foreword’ (n 2), viii.
- 31.
Ibid. On this belief, see also Cassese 1990, 114, 145–147.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
Cf. Francioni 2016, 498 (referring to Conforti’s textbook as an incredible evergreen and an exceptional manual). In a review of the seventh edition (dated 2006) of this textbook, Bruno Simma, after summing up its remarkable qualities, concluded that they ‘explain why in Italian universities the name Conforti is frequently used as synonymous with international law’, Simma 2006, 450.
- 35.
- 36.
See Iovane 2015, 6.
- 37.
See, e.g., Capotorti 1953.
- 38.
Conforti 1968.
- 39.
Picone and Conforti 1988.
- 40.
See, e.g., Conforti 1993.
- 41.
This increasing and relentless experience in international affairs led to Ferrari Bravo’s appointment as the Legal Adviser at Italy’s Permanent Missions to the United Nations (first in New York, 1981–1984, then in Geneva, 1984–1985) and, subsequently, as the Head of the Legal Service (Servizio del Contenzioso Diplomatico) of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1985–1994).
- 42.
- 43.
Ferrari Bravo 1985.
- 44.
The project La giurisprudenza italiana in materia internazionale, aimed at collecting the Italian jurisprudence relevant to (private and public) international law as from 1861, has resulted in seventeen volumes published between 1973 and 1997; see, e.g., Lamberti Zanardi et al 1973, reviewed by Duintjer Tebbens, (1974) 21 Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Internationaal Recht 359. See also Gaja 1966; Starace and De Caro 1977; Picone and Conforti 1988. For similar initiatives relating to treaty practice, see Cassese 1990, 131.
- 45.
- 46.
Oddly, the first volume (Vol. I (1938)) did not provide any information about the Editors of this yearbook and their programme of work, as noted by a bewildered reviewer in the AJIL, see Riesenfeld 1938. According to a study dating back to those years, the general editor of Jus Gentium was Pietro La Terza, see Giannini 1948, 389.
- 47.
After World War II, it was renamed Jus Gentium: diritto delle relazioni internazionali and in this guise twelve volumes were published between 1949 and 1985.
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
The number of editors-in-chief progressively increased in the following years. At the time of disappearance of the periodical in 1974, these were Balladore Pallieri, Giuseppe Biscottini, Giorgio Cansacchi, Rodolfo De Nova, Rolando Quadri and Giancarlo Venturini.
- 51.
See the unauthored foreword to the first volume, (1937) 1 Diritto internazionale ix.
- 52.
See the unauthored foreword in (1949) 7 Annali di diritto internazionale v. For a brief notice of this volume welcoming the resumption of publication of the periodical, see Kunz 1952.
- 53.
That is, the Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale (ISPI) in Milan.
- 54.
See the foreword to the last issue (published in March 1974), De Nova 1971.
- 55.
At any rate, this failure to consider Italian practice by a periodical which—though not presenting itself as a national yearbook—had been created, based and edited in Italy, was quite controversial. See indeed the criticism expressed on this point in a review to the third and final volume (1967–1968) of the Annuario (Bardonnet 1971, 662).
- 56.
As said, in 1959 Diritto internazionale became a quarterly journal. It is thus easy to speculate that Quadri saw fit to step in with ‘his own’ yearbook, which would be in direct competition with the other remaining Italian yearbook, that is, Comunicazioni e studi.
- 57.
A plausible reason for its termination were financial hurdles, see Ingravallo 2020, 211.
- 58.
- 59.
In addition to Francioni, Ronzitti and Sacerdoti, the current Board of Editors includes Giuseppe Cataldi, Pierre-Marie Dupuy, Marco Gestri, Massimo Iovane, Giuseppe Nesi, Riccardo Pavoni and Nigel White.
- 60.
The Editorial Committee has continued to expand in the ensuing years, so that it now includes the following fourteen members: Pia Acconci, Giulio Bartolini, Leonardo Borlini, Andrea Caligiuri, Alessandro Chechi, Serena Forlati, Pietro Gargiulo, Federico Lenzerini, Marina Mancini, Raffaella Nigro, Marco Pertile, Elena Sciso, Paolo Turrini and Valentina Vadi.
- 61.
See https://italyspractice.info. The founder and Editor-in-Chief is Marco Pertile. The website includes materials dating from March 2011. It should be noted that this website is basically run by the same scholars who are in charge of the section on Diplomatic and Parliamentary Practice of the IYIL. For the purposes of the IYIL, the materials published online are further selected, revised and elaborated upon. Therefore, this website may be regarded as a sort of spin-off of that section of the IYIL.
- 62.
See https://www.larassegna.isgi.cnr.it/en. The current Editors-in-Chief are Giuseppe Palmisano and Ornella Ferrajolo. The time span covered so far is the years 2012–2017.
- 63.
See https://opil.ouplaw.com/page/ILDC/oxford-reports-on-international-law-in-domestic-courts. The current Editors-in-Chief are André Nollkaemper (co-founder with Erika de Wet) and August Reinisch. I have been coordinating the work of Italian reporters for some fifteen years, on the assumption that there would be no duplication with the IYIL section on Judicial Decisions. This is indeed the case, since the format of headnotes in ILDC and that of case notes in the IYIL is very dissimilar, the latter being much more elaborated.
- 64.
See (2017) 27 IYIL 427, and (2018) 28 IYIL 455.
- 65.
See (2017) 27 IYIL 465, and (2018) 28 IYIL 505.
- 66.
- 67.
Reference is especially made to the section on German Practice inaugurated by the German Yearbook of International Law since its Vol. 52 (2009), see Giegerich and Proelss 2009.
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Pavoni, R. (2021). Italian Yearbook of International Law: Genesis, Development and Prospects. In: Spijkers, O., Werner, W.G., Wessel, R.A. (eds) Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 2019. Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, vol 50. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-403-7_17
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