Abstract

Social science studies dealing with welfare state and the labor market issues do not consider frequently the role of Constitutional Courts. Instead, the present essay illustrates the good reasons to focus attention on this actor too. Most Constitutions, especially those drawn up after the Second World War, establish the recognition of a series of social rights, such as the right to housing, medical care, education or income protection. The contribution reconstructs how often and in what forms the Italian Constitutional Court has dealt with these social rights throughout its history, including those relating to work. To this end, it uses an original database, with which all the decisions of the Court were collected and catalogued from the year of its establishment in 1956 until mid-2023. The essay shows how the topic of social rights has been increasingly at the core of the Constitutional Court’s action over time. In particular, the main welfare state and public administration reforms that began in the 1990s, the federalist constitutional reform of 2001, the austerity policies following the financial crisis that began in 2007-08 and the emergence of «new social risks» in Italian society and the economy in recent decades, have increasingly moved the Court’s focus of action, to the point that from 2011 onwards almost half of its sentences concerned precisely social rights.