Ricerc@Sapienza

Purpose: Italy has long lacked a law regulating patients' informed consent and advance directives (ADs). All previous attempts to introduce a law on this matter failed to reach positive outcomes, and aroused heated ideological debate over the exact meaning of life and death. We report on the new law on informed consent and ADs approved by the Italian Parliament on 14th December 2017. Materials and methods: We analyse the new law and discuss the main ethical points connected with it, in the Italian context and in comparison with the international situation.

Il Parlamento italiano ha recentemente approvato la legge n. 219 del 22 dicembre 2017 dal titolo “Norme in materia di consenso informato e di disposizioni anticipate di trattamento”. Il lavoro si propone di evidenziare gli aspetti chiave della nuova normativa, esplicitare il ruolo delle direttive anticipate di trattamento e fornire chiare linee operative per il personale sanitario. L’analisi della legge è stata compiuta sulla base del contesto legislativo e deontologico italiano, nonché delle pronunce giurisprudenziali in materia.

Brain death in pregnancy (BDinP) has been described in literature as a “rare event” and “hopeless condition for
patients”, who has a devastating potential to negatively affect the poetry of the moment of welcoming a new human
life to the world. Clinical consequences of BDinP are extremely dangerous for the life of a foetus that, without prompt
medical actions, is doomed to suffer the same fate as the mother. Modern medical techniques make it possible to

Assisted suicide is the subject of much debate throughout the world. In Italy, on 24 September 2019, the Italian Constitutional Court legitimised assisted suicide under certain conditions: self-determination capacity, irreversible illness and intense physical/psychological suffering of the patient. This historic judgement surely paved the way for an evolution of the Italian legal framework on the matter but also raised some challenging medico-legal and bioethical questions.

The present study examined the interplay between self-determined motivation and the use of cognitive strategies in predicting university students’ academic performance while taking into account the effect of prior achievement. A theory based model was tested using structural equation modeling on a sample of 764 Italian university students. Results showed that prior achievement influenced students’ academic performance and their motivation and use of cognitive strategies.

A legal approach to surrogacy raises a number of complex and delicate issues that directly affect
self-determination and relations concerning the very origin of human life. Besides, it implies
different approaches to human dignity, as it is revealed by the comparison of different regulations
and judicial decisions on the matter. On this ground, the Author discusses the most common
approaches to surrogacy, trying to construe an alternative paradigm suitable to overcome

The paper, considering that, in recent years, the concept of dignity is opposed to that of life and frequently combined with the alleged right to assisted suicide, aims to identify the cultural premises of this assumption and to evaluate it in the light of the Constitution. Crucial appear the theories based on the distinction between man and person, such as social Darwinism. In these views the dignity of every human being depends on capacities of autonomy or self-determination.

La recensione del volume di Volker Prott affronta i temi della sistemazione dei confini europei nel primo dopoguerra e la "concettualizzazione" del principio di autodeterminazione nazionale, fra idealismo wilsoniano e realpolitik europea, in particolare nei casi di Alsazia-Lorena e Anatolia.