https://doi.org/10.4081/mem.1997.872
The right to life, constitutional principles and an interpretation by values
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
The article aims to show the role that the right to life, in its axiologic perspective, can play within the legal system of constitutional democracies. There is a close connection between life and the notion of the person and the latter is placed in the centre of the constitutional system. In developing some of Antonio Baldassarre's considerations on the need for the life value to be balanced by an equal value, the author proposes the possibility of establishing a hierarchy within the so called interpretation by values, which has at the top, the right to life as the precondition of any other right. In this perspective the right to life deeply affects the destiny of pluralistic democracies and becames the principle of their legitimation.
In other words, the author concludes that the right to life can be understood as the Grundnorm without, however, being taken in a hypothetical and conventional way according to the kelsenian plan, and thus qualifies the whole system from a juridical and ethical point of view.
How to Cite
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
- the author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.