PRAVNI ZAPISI • Year IX • No. 1 • pp. 43-74
THE GRADUAL TRANSFORMATION OF SPANISH CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: ON OCCASION OF THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SPANISH 1978 CONSTITUTION
Prof. dr dr h.c. mult. Carlos Flores Juberías
Profesor ustavnog prava, Pravni fakultet Univerziteta u Valensiji
e-mail: carlos.flores@uv.es
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Pravni zapisi, No. 1/2018, pp. 43-74
Original Scientific Article
KEY WORDS
Constitutional law, Spain, democratic transition
ABSTRACT
After a century and a half full of swings and hesitations, in which as a consequence of the limited rooting of the constitutional feeling and the lack of normative value of the constitutions, the study of constitutionalism suffered in Spain of lack of object and of method, turning itself into an encyclopaedic discipline of magmatic consistency and imprecise limits, the adoption in 1978 of the current Spanish Constitution and the separation between Political Science and Constitutional Law imposed from 1981 onwards made it possible for the latter to have its object and its method precisely outlined, advancing by leaps and bounds to occupy the place it merits in a social and democratic rule of Law state and above all, the place that such systems demand from it and giving rise to a scientific community which in such period of time has grown, has renovated, and has buried many old clichés in the process. After carrying out a hasty characterization of the evolution of Spanish constitutional law since the times of the Cadiz Constitution and some more precise reflections on its state at the time of the beginning of the Spanish democratic transition, the present study will analyze the main dogmatic concerns and lines of research of Spanish Constitutional Law in the last forty years, differentiating those of the times of the implementation of the new constitutional system from those arising in the wake of its current crisis.