The politics and dogmatics of constitutional law
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu25.2024.403Abstract
Due to the development of post-globalisation, the main focus of attention of legal studies is shifting on the legal politics. Being a semantically complex concept, the legal politics causes the more difficulties in the context of constitutional law, since its norms have a certain target orientation in themselves, and also have a regulatory impact on all branches of law. We propose to subdivide the policy of constitutional law into activity (constitutional-legal politics as a practical activity) and epistemological (politics of constitutional law as studies). In this case, it is proposed to understand constitutional politics as the implementation of constitutional values by changing the text of the constitution and transforming the meaning of its provisions in the course of interpretation and concretisation. The study of constitutional law politics, in addition to its purely cognitive role, can have a disciplining effect on constitutional politics, thus protecting constitutional values and the constitutional identity of the political community. However, it seems, that the consensual current interest in the legal politics should not exclude the problems of dogmatics, the development of which is closely related to current political-legal issues. Legal dogmatics is primarily interested in analysing and identifying the key concepts. However, the constitutional law dogmatic faces a number of difficulties due to the specificity of its main concepts. A significant part of the fundamental constitutional-legal concepts, while possessing a more or less static semantic core, turn out to be fundamentally connected with the peculiarities of a concrete order. It predetermines a certain mobility of semantic boundaries of the relevant concepts. This specificity dictates new ways of development of the constitutional law dogmatics, such as the history and sociology of concepts. The dogmatics of constitutional law updated through them may also be a way to discipline constitutional politics by pointing to the unchanging boundaries of key polemical concepts. However, neither constitutional politics, nor the science of constitutional law politics, nor even the dogmatics of constitutional law can organise their own structure without a more general view from the perspective of the constitutional ideal. The elaboration of this ideal is likely to be the subject of a different discipline — the philosophy of constitutional law.
Keywords:
constitutional politics, politics of law, politics of constitutional law, dogmatics of law, dogmatics of constitutional law
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