The principle of legality in criminal law: within the European constitutional order

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the principle of legality in criminal law within the European constitutional order. After a brief introduction to the historical and philosophical origins of the principle, the article focuses on how the Italian Constitution recognised it and how the Italian Constitutional Court interpreted it. In the last section, we drew out a short comparison between the Italian and the European conception of legality in criminal law in order to understand whether and how the two paradigms are similar.