The United Sections of the Corte di Cassazione, with sentence no. 16601 of the 5^th July 2017, commented the delicate question of the compatibility of punitive damage with the Italian legal system, affirming the following principle of law: “In the current legal system, the civil responsibility must not only restore the sphere of assets of the person who suffered the injury, since the deterrence function and the sanctioning function of the civil liability are internal to the system. This institute of US origin is therefore not ontologically incompatible with the Italian legal system. The recognition of a foreign sentence containing such a sentence must however correspond to the condition that it has been rendered in the foreign legal system on the basis of regulations that guarantee the typicality of the convictions, the predictability of the same and the quantitative limits, having to have regard, during the deliberation, solely to the effects of the foreign act and to their compatibility with public order ".

In these terms the United Sections have taken a position in favor of the compatibility of the this institute with the Italian legal system; the enunciation of this principle, however, does not establish the direct admissibility in Italy of the foreign sentence that provides for the sentence to "punitive damages": it is necessary, in any case, to verify that in the foreign order (not fundamental in the Italian one, which is only called to verify the compatibility of the pronunciation rendered abroad) the aforesaid judgments are anchored to adequate regulatory bases, meeting the principles of typicality (precise identification of the case) and predictability (clear clarification of the quantitative limits of the deliverable judgments).