Oral Communication 2024

The Use of Blockchain
for Legislative Simplification and Tracking

Authors Ludovico Papalia, Chantal Bomprezzi
Presented 14–15 May 2024
Venue 6th DLT Workshop 2024 — Turin, Italy
Language English
Download PDF Available at DLT2024 ↗ Conference website ↗ Cite this paper

In the Italian legislative process, documents exchanged between institutions such as the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Ministry of Justice are not managed through a unified database system. This fragmented structure — required by the constitutional imperative to maintain separation of powers and by security and redundancy concerns — produces substantial inefficiencies in document exchange, traceability of legislative history, and public accessibility of regulatory information. This study examines whether blockchain technology can at least partially address these inefficiencies. Building on the xLeges project, an avant-garde P2P architecture for the electronic transmission of legislative documents developed since 2014 under the Italian government's Normattiva programme, the research analyses how blockchain properties — immutability, transparency, decentralisation, and security — can enhance interoperability among institutional actors, provide tamper-evident versioning of legislative acts, and facilitate document retrieval by both institutional operators and citizens. The paper assesses the technical and legal feasibility of such an implementation and draws on comparative analysis of blockchain applications in other jurisdictions.

Blockchain Legislative Simplification Document Tracking xLeges Legal Informatics Separation of Powers Interoperability DLT Akoma Ntoso Italian Legislative Process
Papalia, L., & Bomprezzi, C. (2024). The use of blockchain for legislative simplification and tracking [Oral communication]. In Proceedings of the 6th Distributed Ledger Technology Workshop (DLT 2024), Turin, Italy. https://dlt2024.di.unito.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/DLT2024_paper_51.pdf