CONSTITUTIONAL JUSTICE – HISTORY, CHARACTERISTICS AND MODELS
CONSTITUTIONAL JUSTICE – HISTORY, CHARACTERISTICS AND MODELS

Summary/Abstract: In the sense recognized today, the term „constitutional justice” appears in Hans Kelsen’s and Gh. Eisenmann’s work. For the first, it means „the constitutional guarantee of the constitution”, and for the second „that kind of justice or better jurisdiction which bears over the constitutional laws”, thus, Eisenmann states that without this form of jurisdiction regarding constitutional norms, the constitution is nothing more than „a political program, only morally binding”. For both Kelsen and Eisenmann, constitutional justice is a jurisdictional guarantee of the constitution, but Eisenmann distinguishes between „constitutional justice” and „constitutional jurisdiction”, the juridical meaning of „constitutional justice”. Constitutional justice has been and is considered an immanent dimension of the rule of law, seen less as astate, and more as a movement of rationalization of power, in which constitutional control “is valued as a structural principle”. Identifying the features of constitutional justice, in the narrow sense of constitutional control, is an useful and necessary approach not only to reveal the particularities of this form of justice, carried out by a special and specialized body, but also to achieve the delimitation of this body by others which also, to a greater or lesser extent, undertake a constitutional review. The French doctrine uses the syntagm of control of the constitutionality of laws as a synonym for constitutional justice, an expression that seems to be initiated in Romania as well. Examining constitutional systems and doctrine, it appears that the emergence of constitutional control of laws, and of constitutional justice, is a long-lasting historical process, which is based on the rule of law. Control of the constitutionality of laws is the result of a double European and American tradition, whose components have mutually influenced one another. The theoretical foundation of this control is the existence of a hierarchy of norms or the existence of the supremacy of the constitution. In turn, the recognition of this hierarchy of norms is the result of a long historical development of legal thinking.

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