Hello Everyone,

I'm writing today with some news that I find fairly discouraging, and I think you will too. It would be easy to get deep into the weeds, so I will aim to give a brief but accurate description of what has happened, but I encourage you to write with any questions you have.

In June, a case was heard before a portion of the Supreme Court in Italy. This case bears a striking resemblance to ours -- they were seeking to be recognized as Italian citizens, but their line went through a child born before 1948 (in our case Ooma) to an Italian citizen mother (in our case Grandma Florence) who was a minor when her father naturalized (in our case Grandpa Arduino). The Supreme Court's opinion agreed with the logic used by Judge Pezone in our initial case, the case in question was rejected, and the plaintiffs are not Italian citizens.

This is bad news for us. If the Appeals Court, which will be hearing our case in June, decides to follow the precedent set by this Supreme Court ruling, then our case will almost certainly be rejected. They may decide to continue ruling in the way that they have been ruling, which would be to our benefit. Precedent is not binding in the same way in the Italian Civil Law system as it is in our US, so this is a live option. The Appeals Court has been so consistent in disagreeing with the logic that Judge Pezone and the Supreme Court have forwarded, that I think it's perhaps even likely that they would rule in a way that flouts that ruling.

I must add here that even more than this being bad news for us, this situation brings a lot of uncertainty. We don't know how the Appeals Court will rule on cases like ours in light of the Supreme Court decision. We don't know how they will respond to this ruling from the Supreme Court only being from a small panel, not the full panel of the Supreme Court. We don't know how the Ministry of the Interior, the party that we are suing, will respond -- specifically if they would appeal if we were to get a positive ruling from the Appeal court. There is so much that we don't know yet. Fortunately, the timeline for our case does allow us to know a bit about how other cases play out, which could give us more insight into the likely outcome of our case.

I am quite sad about this development. I imagine that you might be too. I know that being citizens factored into concrete plans that some of you have, and dreams that I think all of us have. I feel very frustrated so much work, time, effort, and money may have all been for nothing. All of that said, I get a little bit of peace knowing that these things are ultimately out of my control, that we have done all that we can do, and nothing is decided at this point. We just have to keep waiting.

Let me know what questions this brings up for you.

Love you all,

Noah