Tutor: Prof.ssa Stefania Puddu Co-tutor: Prof. Federico Cappai

Short bio:

He graduated in Law from the University of Cagliari on 13 December 2019, submitting a thesis entitled “The pre-contractual liability of public administration”.
On 10 November 2020, he was awarded the prize for being the best graduate of the single-cycle master's degree programme at the Faculty of Economics, Law and Political Science at the University of Cagliari.
Since October 2023, he has been a PhD student in Legal Sciences at the same university. His research project explores the role of administrative discretion in the new public procurement code (Legislative Decree 36/2023).
He is currently conducting research abroad at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, CLIMA research centre, from March to September 2025.

Thesis abstract:

The research project under development aims to study the role of administrative discretion in the new public procurement law (d.lgs. 36/2023). Specifically, the first part of the dissertation aims to carry out a diachronic analysis of the Italian and European regulations on public procurement, in order to identify the goals pursued by the national and European legislators in the different periods of regulation and to highlight an atavistic legislative tendency to enclose the discretion of the contracting authority in an annihilating regulatory framework. Starting from an examination of the general law on public accounting (R.D. 2440/1923), which regulated the matter of public contracts from the unification of Italy until the 1970s, we arrive at an analysis of the first national transposition of the fourth generation of European directives through Legislative Decree 50/2016 and its many criticisms, which led the national legislator to reform the discipline as a whole. The second part, on the other hand, focuses on the analysis of the principles and legal institutions of Decree-Law 36/2023, which, in contrast to the previous discipline, promotes and assigns centrality to the discretionary power of the public administration in the guise of the contracting authority. In this regard, reference is made to the principles of result, trust and administrative self-organisation, as well as to the regulation of the causes of exclusion of economic operators for lack of general requirements. Finally, the third and last part of the work will focus on a critical analysis of the most recent reform interventions that have concerned the factors considered by doctrine and jurisprudence as decisive for the development of the phenomenon of the so-called "defensive bureaucracy": the offence of abuse of office and the regulation of administrative-accounting liability. Indeed, the study of these regulatory changes, even though they concern areas of discipline outside the codified articles, seems indispensable to carry out a systematic analysis of the ways in which the legislator has chosen to strengthen and promote the initiative and decision-making autonomy of public officials in the context of public procurement.