Abstract
Although the Italian Constitution contains some specific norms in order to warrant the freedom of research, the most useful test for determining the constitutionality of the legislative restrictions to this freedom are shaped on the model of free speech jurisprudence. The same remark is true also for the limits to the access to funds. In this paper are examined, in a comparative perspective, some recent cases from Italian legislation and jurisprudence. It is also prospected a judicial protection of the collective interest in the “free scientific research.”
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Notes
- 1.
See briefly R. Delgado, D. R. Miller, God, Galileo, and Government: Toward Constitutional Protection for Scientific Inquiry, in 53 Wash. L. Rev. (1977–1978), 392 ss.; J. A. Robertson, The Scientist’s Rights to Research: A Constitutional Analysis, in 51 S. Cal. L. Rev. (1977–1978), 1203 ss.
- 2.
I developed this metaphor in Diritti e fraintendimenti: il nodo della rappresentanza, in Scritti in onore di G. Berti, Napoli 2005, I, 345 ss., and, previously, in Diritti e fraintendimenti, in Ragion pratica (2000), 15 ss.
- 3.
See T. I. Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression, New York 1970, 593 ss. On the difficulty to define academic freedom see now E. Barenddt, Academic Freedom and the Law (a Comparative Study), Oxford and Portland, Or., 2010.
- 4.
See G. L. Francione, Experimentation and the Marketplace Theory of the First Amendment, in 136 “U. Pa. L. Rev.” (1987), 417 ss. “La sperimentazione rappresenta quella sequenza del fenomeno scientifico in cui il ragionamento umano lascia il posto ad un’azione materiale diretta a verificare concretamente la serietá della ipotesi… precedentemente elaborata, ma solo in astratto, dal ricercatore”: L. CHIEFFI, Ricerca scientifica e tutela della persona, Napoli 1993, 181.
- 5.
See B. P. McDonald, Government regulation or other “abridgements” of scientific research: the proper scope of judicial review under the first amendment, in 54 Emory L.J. (2005), 979 ss.
- 6.
“These restrictions are not externally imposed to protect legal interests, but rather are conceptually implicit in science and serve as an expression of scientific autonomy”: C. Starck Freedom of Scientific Research and Its Restrictions in German Constitutional Law, in 39 Israel L. Rev. (2006) 113.
- 7.
Corte cost., decision n. 282/2002.
- 8.
Corte cost., decision n. 151/2009.
- 9.
Indicative, in this context, is decision n. 166/2004, which declared the illegitimacy of the regional law that banned scientific experimentation on animals.
- 10.
Decision 114/1998.
- 11.
The regulations of these boards may appear to introduce a system of licensing incompatible with the constitutional freedoms: e. g., with regards to the federal regulation of the Institutional Review Boards, see P. Hamburger, The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards, in Sup. Ct. Rev. (2004), 271 ss.
- 12.
Also what may be qualified as a ‘scientific’ work depends on indices defined by the same scientific community: see the Jugendgefährdende Schriften Urteil (BVerGE, 90, 1, 13).
- 13.
See again C. Starck, Freedom of Scientific Research cit., at 115 ss.
- 14.
As stated by the Bundesverfassungsgericht, whatever the content of the constitutional clause on human dignity, including at art. 1.1. of GG, offenbar läßt sich das nicht generell sagen, sondern immer nur in Ansehung des konkreten Falles (BVerGE, 30, 1, 25).
- 15.
“… denn die Menschenwürde als Wurzel aller Grundrechte ist mit keinem Einzelgrundrecht abwägungsfähig”: BVerfGE, 93, 266 (293) and in the same terms BVerfGE 107, 275 (284). See, critically, M. Luciani, Positività, metapositività e parapositività dei diritti fondamentali, in Scritti in onore di L. Carlassare, III, Napoli 2009, 155 ss., 1060 ss.
- 16.
On this theme see G.R. Stone, Content-Neutral Restrictions, in 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. (1987), 46 ss., and, with regards to the abridgments to the scientific inquiry, J. A. Robertson, The Scientist’s Rights to Research cit., at 1247 ss.
- 17.
On this theme see now, with an in-depth analyses of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court on content-based restrictions of the protection of the freedom of expression, D. M. O’Brien, Congress shall make no law, Lanham MD, 2010.
- 18.
On the inconsistency with the freedom of scientific research of restrictions grounded on religiöser oder weltanschaulicher Hinsichtk see the well-known Hessisches Universitätsgesetz (BVerfGE 47, 327, 385).
- 19.
I developed this comparison in La Corte e la scienza, in Bio-tecnologie e valori costituzionali. Il contributo della giustizia costituzionale, edited by A. D’Aloia, Torino 2006.
- 20.
D.lgs. 116/1992.
- 21.
Art. 3: “1. The use of animals in experiments… is permitted only for one or more of the following purposes: a) the development, production and testing of the quality, efficacy and safety of pharmaceutical drugs, foods and other substances and products required: 1) for the prevention, diagnosis or treatments of diseases, states of ill health or other anomalies or their effects on humans, animals and plants; 2) for the evaluation, detection, control or modifications of the physiological conditions of humans, animals or plants; b) the protection of the natural environment in the interest of the health and welfare of humans and animals.”
- 22.
With a subsequent law (L. 413/1993) the legislator intervened to protect another interest, the right to conscientious objection of those who find themselves involved in experimental practices on animals.
- 23.
Thus, in decision n. 166/2004, the Court ruled the illegitimacy of the law of the Regione Emilia- Romagna, which had broken this equilibrium by introducing a series of rigid and absolute prohibitions of the practice of vivisection.
- 24.
L. 40/2004.
- 25.
As described in the picturesque and anthropomorphic terminology adopted in the Ministerial Decree of 4 August 2004.
- 26.
Since, as correctly observed, the dilemma surrounding the moral status of the embryo can be reduced to this alternative: “death by being discarded or death by means that salvages the value for future discovery and the potential for providing medical benefit”: P. Berg, Brilliant Science, Dark Politics, Uncertain Law, in 46 Jurimetrics (2005–2006), at 383.
- 27.
“These are the kinds of issues for which the law, especially in its more intrusive modes, is unsuited — issues of intense moral controversy, involving almost infinite factual variability and constantly changing scientific facts”: R. B. Dworkin, Limits. The Role of the Law in Bioethical Decision Making, Bloomington — Indianapolis 1996, at 146.
- 28.
This is the argument used by the American Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional the Texan law that criminalised homosexuality: for the use of this precedent against the legitimacy of a repressive law concerning embryo research see S. Goldberg, Cloning Matters: How Lawrence v. Texas Protects Therapeutic Research, in 4 Yale J. Health Pol’y L. & Ethics (2004), 305 ss., 315.
- 29.
D. W. Jordaan, Science versus Anti-Science: The Law on Pre-Embryo Experimentation, in 124 S. African L.J. (2007), 618.
- 30.
Hence, decision n. 151/2009, which declared the illegitimacy of the norm stipulating a maximum number of embryos for implantation in a single operation, while forbidding doctors the cryopreservation of other embryos for use in the eventuality of a subsequent implant.
- 31.
Decision n. 20/1978.
- 32.
J. A. Robertson, The Scientist’s Rights to Research cit., at 1276, quoting Elrod v. Bums, 427 U.S. 347, 361 (1976).
- 33.
“The most basic question is whether the government has merely made an expenditure for a benefit defined by condition or has, in reality, used the condition to create a substitute for the constraining force of law. In less abstract terms, the issue is whether the government’s conditional spending amounts to a purchase or a regulation”: P. Hamburger, The New Censorship cit., at 319.
- 34.
The text is available at www.salute.gov.it/bandi/documenti/Bando cellule staminali.pdf.
- 35.
The claim and decision of the administrative judges are available at www.unipvlawtech.eu/il non finanziamento della ricerca che utilizzi ce.html.
- 36.
As previously argued by A. Orsi Battaglini, Liberta scientifica, libertà accademica e valori costituzionali, in Nuove dimensioni nei diritti di libertà (Scritti in onore di Barile), Padova 1990, 89 ss., 98.
- 37.
Decision n. 201/1995. Elsewhere the Court has included research among “essential common goods” (Decision n. 500/1993) and has referred to it as a “constitutionally safeguarded value such as scientific research” (Decision n. 423/2004, echoing numerous other rulings in regard to the divisions of State and Regional powers).
- 38.
This is the case not only in the previously mentioned Decision n. 20/1978, but also, for example, in Decision n. 569/2000 (where the Court rejects the censuring of a provision of the Regione Liguria, in favour of promoting, research and clinical experimentation activities, on the part of the Regional Department of Genetics, citing its “constant jurisprudence… according to which activity of diagnosis and hospital treatment of the sick is not only not incompatible, but on the contrary, is susceptible of being intimately linked to, or even ‘at one’ with the activity of scientific research”).
- 39.
On the theory of “privileged” forms of freedom of expression see critically A. Pace & M. Manetti, La libertà di manifestazione del proprio pensiero, in Commentario della Costituzione, edited by G. Branca, Bologna Roma 2006, 54 s.
- 40.
C. Tripodina, Art. 32, in Commentario breve alla Costituzione, edited by S. Bartole and R. Bin, Padova 2008, 322.
- 41.
The issues addressed by the Court in the Decision n. 185/1998 concerned the legitimacy of a legislative act that limited access to a free experimentation of a group of substances constituting a “multi-treatment” of cancers. The Court declared it illegitimate “…insofar as it does not envisage the provision on the part of national health service of the drugs employed in the treatment of tumoral pathologies, for which the experiment was set up,… to those who are in an insufficient economic condition, according to the criteria stipulated by the legislator, but are within the objective, subjective and temporal limits mentioned in the motivations”, that is to say, terminally sick patients.
- 42.
See U. Pototschnig, Istruzione (diritto alla), in Enc. Dir., XXIII (1973), at 96 ss.
- 43.
On the predictability of a subjective right to information see A. Pace & M. Manetti, La libertà di manifestazione del proprio pensiero, cit., at 346 s. (authors acknowledge the existence of a subjective (and legally enforceable) right of the individual to obtain information of interest to him/her only with regard to certain subjects, and “only in the extent to which the normal transmission of information is culpably prejudiced in his/her specific regard”. In other words, particularly in a system like the Italian one, where freedom of expression is not “functionalised” to the formation of a free public opinion, one cannot configure a subjective right to information as deriving from art. 21 Cost., but only in terms of a specific legal discipline (e.g. the one regulating televised broadcasting).
For a comparative approach to the relationship between freedom of information and the right to be informed, see E. Barendt Freedom of Speech, 2nd ed., Oxford — New York 2005, 108–112.
References
See briefly R. Delgado, D. R. Miller, God, Galileo, and Government: Toward Constitutional Protection for Scientific Inquiry, in 53 Wash. L. Rev. (1977–1978), 392 ss.; J. A. Robertson, The Scientist’s Rights to Research: A Constitutional Analysis, in 51 S. Cal. L. Rev. (1977–1978), 1203 ss.
See T. I. Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression, New York 1970, 593 ss. On the difficulty to define academic freedom see now E. Barenddt, Academic Freedom and the Law (a Comparative Study), Oxford and Portland, Or., 2010.
See G. L. Francione, Experimentation and the Marketplace Theory of the First Amendment, in 136“U. Pa. L. Rev.” (1987), 417 ss. “La sperimentazione rappresenta quella sequenza del fenomeno scientifico in cui il ragionamento umano lascia il posto ad un’azione materiale diretta a verificare concretamente la serietà della ipotesi… precedentemente elaborata, ma solo in astratto, dal ricercatore”: L. CHIEFFI, Ricerca scientifica e tutela della persona, Napoli 1993, 181.
See B. P. McDonald, Government regulation or other “abridgements” of scientific research: the proper scope of judicial review under the first amendment, in 54 Emory L.J. (2005), 979 ss.
D. W. Jordaan, Science versus Anti-Science: The Law on Pre-Embryo Experimentation, in 124 S. African L.J. (2007), 618.
J. A. Robertson, The Scientist’s Rights to Research cit., at 1276, quoting Elrod v. Bums, 427 U.S. 347, 361 (1976).
C. Tripodina, Art. 32, in Commentario breve alla Costituzione, edited by S. Bartole and R. Bin, Padova 2008, 322.
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Bin, R. (2012). Freedom of Scientific Research in the Field of Genetics. In: Bin, R., Lorenzon, S., Lucchi, N. (eds) Biotech Innovations and Fundamental Rights. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2032-0_10
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