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Cuocolo: On the Web with Il Ricostituente

, by Davide Ripamonti, translated by Jenna Walker
The Bocconi Faculty member, who also works as a lawyer and consultant to local and European organizations, provides explanations of how the Italian Constitution is applied in his recently-launched blog. The aim is to make constitutional topics more comprehensible to readers

Lorenzo Cuocolo, 35 years old, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law at Università Bocconi, holds several positions and performs many activities: a lawyer in Genoa, his hometown, and Milan, consultant for the Genovese Port Authorities and consultant for the European Council for issues in environmental conservation. These are "roles in which my two psyches emerge," he jokes, "the local one and the global one."

Lorenzo Cuocolo

But Cuocolo is also interested in all forms of media, from printed material and TV to the web, the means of information that is considered the most popular among the students and professors he meets with on a daily basis in the classroom: "In 2007-2008 I collaborated as an editorialist for the daily newspaper Il Secolo XIX, then this year I participated in a TV program on the Genoa channel Primo Canale, Università Popolare. On the program I take five minutes to comment on constitutional issues which are connected to current events, all aimed at a wide audience."

The issue of making often difficult topics comprehensible to everyday readers and listeners with terms used by experts in the sector is very dear to Cuocolo. It has led him to open a blog with some colleagues, Il Ricostituente, published in Italian, which discusses current events that deal with the Constitution. "The starting point was that we would like to bring constitutional law to the average reader's level, for anyone who would normally read editorials and political pages, but who would never read long technical articles that our legal professionals write in sector journals," explains Cuocolo. "Our objective is both civic and social in a certain sense." Il Ricostituente gathers contributions from Bocconi faculty members who have supported the site from the beginning, such as Edmondo Mostacci and Oreste Pollicino, "but I also talked with other people about the website, such as Maurizio Del Conte and Marco Ventoruzzo, who were very helpful and shared it with colleagues from other universities, providing the widest reach possible. I would even like to create a true editorial panel soon."

"Articles in the Ricostituente need to be short, around 3,000 characters," adds Cuocolo, who also acts as the blog's coordinator. "They are not ideological, so they have a point of view and register that are suitable for the web. The Constitution is actually a common topic of interest, and people who don't work in the sector don't realize it, so our objective is to provide explanations about this area. Since it looks like we're heading towards a period of debate on reforms," continues Cuocolo, "I believe that there needs to be a third-party, neutral voice that aims to give explanations. This is the role of the Ricostituente."

The main audience of the Ricostituente, however, according to its creator, are students. "They often observe a clear separation between what is learned in the classroom and written in their large textbooks and what actually happens in reality. We try to bridge the gap of the separation between theory and practice."

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