Marilisa D'Amico

Marilisa D’Amico is currently Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Milan (UniMi), as well as Vice-Rector with responsibility for Legality, Transparency and Equality of Rights at the same university.

As a scholar of Constitutional Law, she has always delved into issues related to fundamental rights, contributing to fostering scientific debate with specific regard to the so-called new rights, particularly in the areas of the beginning and end of life, female political representation, and civil rights of same-sex couples.

Until 2018, upon her appointment as Vice-Rector, she was also a professional with decades of esteemed career behind her, achieving important and decisive results in front of the Italian Constitutional Court and supranational courts for the recognition of these rights. She became a full professor of Constitutional Law just after having her first daughter and in an academic world still predominantly male: from this experience, she understood the need to use her work to assert the right of women to no longer be forced to choose between pursuing a career or being mothers.

In this perspective, more recently she has urged in the appropriate venues a proposed law that has as its stated objective the contrast to male chauvinism in the mass media and has been the scientific coordinator of advanced courses on Equal Opportunities at the State University of Milan, in the last academic year, in particular, with specific regard also to the issues of gender violence.

As a lawyer, she personally engaged in several civil battles: among these, we can remember the declaration of illegitimacy of the proposal by the former President of the Lombardy Region Formigoni to modify in a detrimental way the law 194 of 1978 on voluntary termination of pregnancy and conscious motherhood, as well as some decisions of unconstitutionality by the Constitutional Court regarding law 40 of 2004 on medically assisted procreation. Furthermore, before the entry into force of the Cirinnà law which since 2016 also allows the celebration of civil unions in Italy, she obtained a very important decision from the Constitutional Court in 2010 recognizing the constitutional relevance of unions formed by people of the same sex and the condemnation of Italy by the European Court of Human Rights in 2015.

Marilisa D'Amico has also been called upon over the years to speak at numerous public events and scientific conferences centered on the themes of equal opportunities for women, combating gender-based violence, fighting against all forms of discrimination, unresolved issues related to assisted reproduction, end-of-life debate, civil unions and same-sex marriage, and protecting the law that has regulated abortion in Italy for four decades by promoting a culture of motherhood as a deliberate, sought-after, and desired choice.