ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book draws inspiration from my experience as a member of the Venice Commission. The book is a result of a substantial rewriting and new drafting of many papers I wrote during that experience.
I am deeply indebted to Antonio La Pergola, founder and first President of the Commission, and to Gianni Buquicchio, the incumbent President, for his foreword. During my more than fifteen years at the Venice Commission, I greatly profited from the exchanges of view with my colleagues Kaarlo Tuori, Hanna Suchocka, Jeffrey Jowell, Jean Claude Scholsem, James Hamilton and Giorgio Malinverni, as well as with the members of the Secretariat of the Commission Simona Granata-Menghini, Schnutz Durr, Pierre Garrone.I am very grateful to Nicola Lupo and Robert Schutze who accepted to propose this book to Hart Publishing, where I met an excellent team: especially Sinead Moloney, Sasha Jawed, Chris Myers, and Tom Adams who have been very helpful in the editorial work. Eventually, I cannot forget the generous and intelligent support that my young colleague Pietro Faraguna gave me in dealing with the digital difficulties of the process of publication, and the supportive contribution of Alessia-Ottilia Cozzi in cooperating in the editorial work. Roberto Bin stimulated the planning of this book when he invited me to introduce a seminar at the University of Ferrara on the internationalisation of the constitutional law.
I thank the board of the European Constitutional Law Review for authorising the publication in Appendix 2 of this book of my article ‘Comparative Constitutional Law - an Indispensable Tool for the Creation of Transnational Law’, originally published in volume 13 (2017) of the Review.