The appointment of Giuseppe Spadaro at the helm of the Catanzaro court marks the start of a new management and relational phase for the judicial office. In a comment, the lawyer Antonello Talerico, national forensic councilor and former president of the Catanzaro Bar Association, analyzed the programmatic and human lines traced by the new President, highlighting the desire to overcome the historic contrast between the judiciary and the legal profession.
In his inaugural speech, Spadaro implicitly recalled the lesson of Piero Calamandrei and his famous Praise of the Judges written by a lawyer, proposing a shared vision of jurisdiction. According to Talerico’s analysis, the key point of the intervention lies in the concept of equiproximity, preferred to that of equidistance: Equidistance defines a formal and bureaucratic detachment of the judge from the parties. Equiproximity instead expresses equal human closeness and sensitivity towards all the subjects involved in the process. This approach translates into the explicit request to consider lawyers not as institutional counterparts, but as collaborators of the jurisdiction.
Hence the President’s concrete invitation to the professionals of the court to favor direct and preventive discussion (“before writing, come and talk to me”), overcoming the rigidity of formal protocols.
Talerico highlights how Spadaro wanted to link his administrative action to the memory of the territory, remembering historical figures of the local judiciary (Ferlaino, Baudi, Vecchio) and the Catanzaro lawyer (Gimigliano, Paparo, Iannello).
The new President also shared some personal passages that outline his professional profile and attention to the human dimension of law: the memory of Mariano Gennaro, a magistrate who died prematurely at the age of 36, whose daughter, Teresa Lidia Gennaro, today practices as a criminal judge in the same Court. The bond with his father, a former member of the judicial police, remembered through the greeting in the courtroom to his historic colleague, the former commissioner Caloiero.
Talerico concludes with a reminder of the responsibility of the local forensic class. The openness and availability shown by the new President require, according to the National Forensic Councillor, an active and synergistic response from the lawyers. «Not just a magistrate has been installed, but an idea of jurisdiction aware that there is a person behind every file. Now it’s up to us, the legal profession first, not to leave him alone. Because men like this, when they arrive, must be accompanied. Not applauded and forgotten.”