L’efficacia dell’autoregolamentazione. L’esperienza dell’autodisciplina pubblicitaria in Italia

The increasing complexity of contemporary legal systems has highlighted the role of public and private actors in the law-making process. This theme, widely explored by socio-legal theory, has also been taken into consideration by the European institutions, in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of law making, especially with regards to self-regulation and co-regulation tools. The article focuses on a particularly successful example of self-regulatory organization, the Istituto Italiano di Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria that has been monitoring the fairness and correctness of commercial communica-tion since 1966. Its effectiveness in guiding the conduct of advertising operators and pro-tecting consumers is widely recognized. However, in a legal system like the Italian one, which still appears to be strongly influenced by a formalistic notion of sources of law, full coordination between legislative instruments and self-regulation does not seem easy to achieve