Neoconstitutionalism, positivism and validity

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, an important segment of the philosophy of law has pointed out that legal positivism offers an inadequate or partial explanation of the concept of validity in contemporary constitutional systems. This paper tries to show that many of these criticisms, based on the institutional characteristics of the judicial review of legislation, and ascribed to the so-called “theoretical neo-constitutionalism”, fail to refute the basic theses of the Hartian positivism and do not offer theoretical instruments that explain in a better way the conditions of validity of the legal norms in the constitutional systems.