Lezione magistrale presso l’Università degli studi Magna Grecia di Catanzaro, organizzata dal Centro nazionale studi di diritto del lavoro Domenico Napoletano (Catanzaro, 14 dicembre 2012).
Contributo in corso di pubblicazione sulla Rivista Italiana di Diritto del Lavoro n. 2/2013.

The instrumentality of judicial procedure rules with regard to the effective protection of workers’ rights constitutes both an objective and, at the same time, an efficiency indicator of labour litigation law. This assumption could be considered as a key statement of Italian system, since the introduction of the new provisions on labour dispute, back in 1973.
Many factors can be functional to such instrumentality of judicial rules with regard to substantive rights: not only the specific rules of procedure but also organizational practices, and hermeneutic options. A clear obstacle to the above mentioned instrumentality of the can be indicated, for example, in the widespread practice of overruling which characterized the jurisprudence of the Corte di Cassazione. And the same could be said of the excessive formalism sometimes affecting judicial decisions
The analysis of the new rules recently dictated in the field of dismissal disputes (Law no. 92 of 2012) offers an occasion to illustrate these risks. The Author contends that in order to overcome such problems, a sort of “minimal procedural law” has to be devised, with a view of making it possible for the judiciary to guarantee that litigation could be effectively instrumental to the protection of substantive rights. That is - as Chiovenda theorized – to guarantee that a judicial action is “capable of giving, as far as is practically possible, to the one who has a right, everything and just what he is entitled to receive".