Affiliation:
1. Professor, Faculty of Law, https://dx.doi.org/54694Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania; Former Justice (1999–2008) and President (2002–2008) of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania; Judge of the European Court of Human Rights (2013–)
Abstract
Abstract
Lithuania’s 1992 Constitution has undergone a series of amendments, including certain structural changes. Besides formal amendments, constitutional regulation is subject to reinterpretation in the Constitutional Court’s case law. As a result, not only the content of specific provisions of the Constitution, but also the very perception of constitutional law has been reshaped by, inter alia, reducing the system of sources of constitutional law to only the Constitution and official constitutional doctrine. Recently the Constitutional Court, in an activist move, undertook modification of the settled new paradigm by introducing the notion of ‘supra-constitutionality’ and by postulating which constitutional provisions, until then deemed amendable, were non-amendable. The article deals with the doctrine in both the historical and the theoretical context and with its effect on the perception of constitutional law, in particular its structure.