Italy on Tuesday got its second woman
supreme court head as 74-year-old Italy Silvana Sciarra was
elected president of the Constitutional Court after current
outgoing Justice Minister Marta Cartabia served a one-year term
from 2019 to 2020.
Sciarra, born in Trani in Puglia on 24 July 1948, was the first
woman to be elected to the top court in 2014.
Sciarra, a jurist and academic specializing in labour law, beat
fellow female Constitutional Justice Daria De Pretis, 65, in the
final ballot Tuesday.
She beat administrative law specialist De Petris by one vote, by
eight to seven, in the ballot to succeed former two-time premier
Giuliano Amato who has retired after reaching the retirement age
of 84.
"I have the privilege of having white hair, perhaps the court
wanted to reward the criterion of seniority," said Sciarra, who
is nine years older than her rival De Pretis.
The Constitutional Court president's main job is to ensure that
laws and conduct comply with the postwar anti-fascist Italian
Constitution.
Sciarra taught European Labour and Social Law at the European
University Institute between 1994 and 2003.
She was a professor of labour law at the University of Florence
and the University of Siena before being appointed to the
Constitutional Court by the Italian Parliament on 6 November
2014. In the parliamentary election she obtained 630 out of a
necessary 570 votes.
She was sworn in on 11 November 2014.
She this became the first woman elected by the Italian
Parliament as a Judge of the Constitutional Court.
Previously, she was a Harkness Fellow at UCLA and Harvard Law
School (1974-1976).
She was Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor in several
Universities, among which Warwick (Leverhulme Professor),
Columbia Law School (BNL Professor), Cambridge (where she held
the Arthur Goodhart Chair in Legal Science 2006-2007),
Stockholm, Lund, University College London.
She holds Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Law at the Universities of
Stockholm (2006) and Hasselt (2012)
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