Abstract

The author first presents the remarkable impact of Ferrajoli’s work in the Spanish-speaking world in various areas of legal culture. He focuses on the extremely important contribution it has made to the culture of jurisdiction through a critique of the old, inherited model and the construction of a constitutionally-inspired alternative. The author then discusses an important aspect of Ferrajoli’s model, namely the place of guarantees in the morphology and dynamics of rights. He concludes that in this model, i.e. within the Constitutional state, any democracy other than that of rights-holding citizens is unthinkable. Consequently, jurisdiction as an instance of guarantees is an essential presupposition of the former.