Abstract

Legal hermeneutics offers an innovative approach within the modern legal tradition of continental Europe. The recognition of the role played by judges in the creation of law assumes special relevance for constitutional interpretation. According to the author, in the context of the constitutional state, constitutional review is an element that imparts stability to the legal system rather than a threat to the principle of legality. The author situates Zaccaria's proposal in the context of neoconstitutionalism and the debate on contemporary global constitutionalism. Contemporary law is "law beyond the state." Today, it is global constitutionalism, generated through case law, that constitutes the reality of law. This evolution of constitutionalism, which hermeneutics explains convincingly, makes manifest the original structure of law after the parenthesis of legal modernity, dominated by the idea of law as a tool at the disposal of the sovereign state.