Islands of Innovation: Exploring the Dark Side of Judicial Innovation in Southern Europe

In the last 20 years and, in particular, following the economic crisis, the Southern European countries have introduced a large number of reforms, with the aim of improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of their judicial systems. Following this long “season of reforms”, despite the fact that on a formal level all the procedural guarantees of due process do exist, justice in southern Europe is still not particularly transparent, effective or efficient, limiting the opportunity for citizens to access justice and protect their rights. However, using the metaphor of a geographical map, if we change the scale of reference, we realize that some courts in southern Europe have become "arenas of innovation", where many local interventions are designed, trialled and implemented. The hypothesis of this paper is that, on one hand, despite the investments made in recent years, the reforms carried out in the southern Europe have only rarely achieved effective, lasting and, above all, widespread results and, on the other, the propensity for innovation of some judicial offices has helped bring out great differences in the ways in which justice is provided in the territory. The paper's arguments are based on the results of a 5-year research project, focused on the 4 main Southern European judicial systems: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.