L’abuso d’ufficio come paradigma della tutela penale della funzione amministrativa

This paper focuses on the crime of abuse of office as the boundary between the legitimate exercise of administrative power and the criminal court's review. The study of abuse of office is inextricably linked to the issue of the criminal judge's review of the discretion of administrative activity, representing this criminal case as the litmus test of the invasiveness of political-criminal choices within the field of activity reserved for the Public Administration. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the crime of abuse of office has been the subject of repeated reformist interventions and an equal number of ambiguous jurisprudential applications. This paper proposes, precisely, to retrace the fundamental lines of the legislative, interpretative and applicative evolution of the crime of abuse of office, focusing in particular on the most important problematic nodes, in highlighting the reasons underlying the persistence still of controversial issues that make abuse of office the terrain of conflicts that are far from solved.