In cammino verso un’ermeneutica prescrittiva nell’applicazione della legge penale

The article takes its cue from reading the books by Alessandra Santangelo and Giuseppe Portonera to update the guarantee reasons underlying the principle of legal reserve and underline the opportunity to resort to Anglo-Saxon import remedies – such as the rule of lenity – capable of inducing the judge to project the reflections of the in dubio pro reo also in the practice of interpretation. The author examines two sentences of the Cassation: in the first we see a reprehensible circumvention of the prohibition of analogy, in the second a restrictive interpretation that can be shared with favorable effects. The passage ends by expressing the concern that recent reforms in the field of post-graduate training aggravate the level of lack of communication among criminal law professionals: by fomenting the diffusion of self-referential languages, they risk favoring the diffusion of interpretative currents destined to relativizing the importance of the statutory reserve.