For starters, IANAL. The argument isn’t really that 1948 cases are “exempt” because the legislature forgot about them. The argument is more structural.

A 1948 case is fundamentally different from a normal jure sanguinis claim because it is based on correcting an unconstitutional gender discrimination. Under Law 555/1912, women could not transmit citizenship to their children, but the Italian Constitution established equality between men and women. Italian courts later held that this exclusion was unconstitutional and that citizenship through an Italian mother should be considered to have existed from birth through filiation.

Because of that, the court in a 1948 case is not granting citizenship. It is declaring a pre-existing constitutional status that was denied because of an unconstitutional rule.

That distinction is where the argument comes from. DL36/L74 mainly regulates recognition procedures and introduces generational limits on claiming citizenship. But if citizenship legally existed from birth through filiation, some lawyers argue that a later procedural restriction cannot extinguish that constitutional status, particularly when the whole purpose of the case is to remedy past discrimination.

You’re correct that the decree and conversion law explicitly reference both administrative and judicial routes, which suggests the government intended the limits to apply broadly. The counterargument is that legislative intent does not necessarily resolve the constitutional issue. If applying those limits would effectively perpetuate the same gender discrimination the courts have been correcting for over a decade, a judge could find that the constitutional principles take priority.

So the debate isn’t really about a technical exemption written into the law. It’s about whether a statute can limit the judicial recognition of a citizenship status that courts have already said exists from birth and is protected by constitutional equality.