Il (disturbo da) gioco d’azzardo tra politica e magistratura

Until ten years ago, the Italian law regulation of gambling showed a more and more thick plot betweenbetween the market interests to rise profit and the public interest of the State to regulate this sector with aims of criminal contrast and tax revenue’s growth. A turning point is represented by the reform of 2012, when the State legislator has recognized the need to reverse that trend, giving a stronger importance, in the balance of interests underlying the regulation of the sector, to the health protection, in the light of the growing andworrying consequences for health that the expansion of the legal gambling market was causing. This passage has led to a change of approach both in the legislation and in the case law, on whose trajectories, however, partial or discordant readings coexist in the law literature today. The essay aims to recompose in an overall reading these trajectories. The analysis will allow us to grasp a substantial stability of the “turning point” of 2012, even in the midst of many conflicting pressures that have characterized the regulatory interventions andthe judges’ decisions of the last decade