Building Bridges between the Legal Professions: the case of the Italian Observatories of Civil Justice

Where are the legal professions heading? What are they trying to do to overcome the difficulties of the judicial systems and, at the same time, to reaffirm their role in society and improve the citizens’ confidence in the legal system? This article will focus on the Italian case presenting the phenomenon of the “Observatories of civil justice”: inter-professional groups that have spontaneously developed in various Italian judicial offices, in order to define some shared interpretative and behavioural practices. The article bases its arguments on the results of a long period of empirical research, conducted with qualitative methods. This case, one of a kind, will give grounds to analyse many of the issues currently under discussion in the broad debate of the emergent socio-legal studies.