Interpretativeness of the Constitution and Laws

The constitution is not only, with regard to its content, the fundamental legal act regulating the basic rights, the basic legal principles and the organization of the state. It is important that it is also the basic procedural act enabling the state community to function. It is in the nature of any legal act, and especially of the constitution, that its content is not automatically preshaped in such a definite manner that it only had to be applied. Before applying a legal act, and especially the constitution, one has to understand it. The constitution offers a series of interpretative possibilities and is sufficiently open with regard to its meaning that the Constitutional Court can further develop it. This further development is particularly made possible by the legal principles to be found among the general provisions and by the set of basic rights comprising many definitions bearing the nature of legal principles. The deceased German professor and esteemed constitutional judge Winfried Hassemer highlights with good reason that the basic rights are the natural-law part of the constitution. The catalogues of these rights in the modern constitutions are an achievement of rationalistic natural law; within the scope in which they entered the constitution, they are an important content-related framework, which can be a source of the development of the basic rights and at the same time a source inspiring and improving the legislation. It is in the nature of any legal act and particularly of the constitution that there exists a difference between the law as a text and the law as a process of interpretation and implementation of this text. This antinomy was already brought to the attention of the audience on 15 April 1920 by Leonid Pitamic in his opening lecture Pravo in revolucija (Law and Revolution), starting the lectures at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana. The mentioned antinomy clearly shows that behind the text, there is always a man making decisions i.e. a man who is also a moral person. It is true that law and morality are not identical, between them there exist even radical differences, but also such close ties that the law loses its legitimacy if the basic constitutional and legal values are forgotten. When interpreting the constitution and the statutes and making decisions, one eventually has to rely only upon himself. This makes the lawyer’s work attractive and challenging, but at the same time assigns to him a burden and a responsibility.