Abstract
The paper is devoted to investigating the relationship between administrative discretion and the role of legal principles, from the perspective of the contract to which a public body is a party.
As is well known, the new Italian Contracts Code opens with a series of principles, placed in hierarchical order.
According to both the legal literature and the first decisions of the administrative courts, it is possible to identify solutions to the problem that are also very distant from each other. The most widespread is the one for which the introduction of the principles and the (only partial) overcoming of the regulation of extremes of detail would result in the creation of significant margins of administrative discretion; administrative discretion that would be necessary in relation to the administrative activity through the contract in order for it to achieve its result. As I see it, this orientation is wrong to hold that principles are a source of discretionary power and not its limit. A second, narrower but very authoritative orientation has argued that the principles of the Italian Contracts Code have, in reality, no relevance, because they would be nothing more than summaries of other principles and rules that are in any case applicable. The fault of this orientation is that it overlooks the fact that the hierarchical ordering of principles determines a criterion for discretionary decisions and for their review by the judge, and this certainly applies to principles in general - so that their composition and ordering is a serious interpretative problem that, instead, in the case of public contracts, is resolved by law.
The immediate purpose of the essay is, instead, to demonstrate that the hierarchical ordering of the principles established by the Italian Contracts Code fulfils the function of dictating the criterion both for the interpretation of the rules applicable to the concrete case, and for their application with the exercise of administrative discretion; consequently, on the one hand (that of the exercise of executive power) it derives a profound limitation of the spaces of discretion and, on the other hand (that of jurisdictional review), a criterion for very profoundly reviewing administrative discretion.
The mediated aim of the essay is to test the validity of the legal theory of the public interest that was proposed in this very journal – see, vol. XIII (2/2023).

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