Gema Marcilla Córdoba

The judgment of proportionality—i.e. the weighing or balancing of two or more competing Legal principles—is often said to be the core of legal reasoning. One of the premises underlying such a contention is that judges adhere to a non-positivistic legal approach: when justifying their rulings, that is, they are certainly “bound by the Law”, but not as this is understood within Legal positivism. A non-positivistic conception of law entails the claim that judges interpreting and applying legal norms do combine, in fact, legal and moral reasoning. On the other hand, Constitutionalism, as a paradigm in law and jurisprudence, implies that a culture of justification extends to all public authorities, i.e. not only to the executive branch and the judiciary but also to legislatures. Thus, the sole fact that a parliament has been democratically elected is not enough to entirely satisfy its claim to Legitimacy—in other words, winning elections cannot be the only basis of legislative authority. Against this backdrop, the focus of this chapter is to explore the possibility of broadening the principle of proportionalityProportionality principle, as characterized by Robert Alexy, to legislative decisions. Additionally, and in connection with the non-positivistic legal approach just mentioned, the second part of the essay will highlight some misunderstandings about the study of lawmaking which one can find in the province of legal theory.

El trabajo tiene por objeto reflexionar sobre el auge de los códigos deontológicos profesionales, así como sobre la tendencia a extenderlos a las instituciones o los poderes públicos, como el parlamento, el gobierno, la administración y el poder judicial. Las normas deontológicas profesionales pueden ser entendidas como normas morales, propias de un colectivo profesional, que estipulan los principios y valores por los que han de regirse quienes se dedican a tal profesión. Al tratarse de un tipo de normatividad, resulta relevante para la teoría jurídica dar cuenta de las relaciones entre los estándares deontológicos y las normas jurídicas. Por último, se pone el acento en los problemas que surgen a la hora de dilucidar el ámbito de conductas de los poderes que pueden estar bajo regulaciones éticas, con valor de recomendación, y cuáles, por el contrario, resultan de inexorable regulación legal por cuanto entrañan responsabilidades jurídicas.