11 THE ITALIAN LAW JOURNAL NO. 1 (2025)
Constitutional Values and Property Law.
by Ugo Mattei
The Latin expression promoveatur ut amoveatur (be promoted in order to be removed) alludes to a human resources management practice, developed within early bureaucratic organizations such as the Catholic Church, the Military, and the Judicial System, intended to marginalize, with no conflict, an undesired member of a hierarchy. Someone who, in their office, would be an impediment to power is promoted at a higher level in order to make them happy but at the same time get rid of them. This practice was recently chastised as a ‘cancer’ by the Holy Father Francis I, while addressing the Roman Curia on the needs to reform the Holy See. However, it is very much in tune with Italian values, such as those so beautifully described in the novel Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: ‘Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi’ (If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change). It is the aim of this paper to show how, in Italy, this strategy has promoted some legal concepts away from the Civil Code where they could, by way of direct judicial enforcement, disrupt the status quo, to the constitutional level, where their translation into actual binding provisions requires a complex process of interpretation and balancing, more of political than technical nature, that often frustrates their potential.
DOI 10.23815/2421-2156.ITALJ ISSN 2421-2156
The promoveatur ut amoveatur iuris Strategy in Italy
