Acceso usuarios
Mauro Barberis
Ethics (morals, politics, law...) is a semantic field, a panoply of concepts which draw meaning from their mutual relationships. This work reconstructs the meanings, still devoid of fixed relationships, of three fairly new labels: "new constitutionalism ", "constitutional democracy", and "value pluralism". The first section distinguishes the meanings of "constitutionalism", "new constitutionalism" and "neo-constitutionalism": the first coined in the XX Century, the second and third in the last twenty years to denote, respectively, an institutional tradition and the legal theory of this tradition. According to the author, there are three theses characterising neo-constitutionalism: a) the idea of a connection between law and morality; b) the distinction between rules and principles; c) the distinction between deduction and balancing. Although the term "new constitutionalism" is often used in a confused way, it is also possible to identify three features: a) the systematic recourse to rights; b) the judicialisation of politics; c) the global interpretation of constitutionalism. The second section concerns constitutional democracy: a form of democracy characterised by the shift -more accurately, the intentional delegation or unintentional dislocation- of normative powers from political to judicial subjects. This shift does not imply the thesis of the sovereignty of judges and the end of democratic politics: in constitutional democracies, sovereignty is shared between legislators and judges and neither has the last word. The third section is about value pluralism as the meta-ethics which perhaps best suits new constitutionalism and constitutional democracy.
