Transformations of Public Law and Their Impact on Human Rights Protection

Keywords: public law, human rights, constitutionalism, legal regulation

Abstract: The aim of this article is to describe a trajectory of evolution of public law and to demonstrate how public regulation reacted on human rights doctrine and vice versa, how transformations of public law changes human rights scholarship. Due to the fact that modern public law emerged before constitutionalism, it had to undergo through fundamental change after the adoption of democratic constitutions. But the establishment of modern states did not stop the process of evolution of public law. New impulses were brought namely by the development of post-war German constitutionalism and recent theories of global constitutionalism and global administrative law. In this article the author argues, that transformations of public law create broader perspective on the role and functions of human rights in contemporary complex system of legal regulation. However, recent transformations of public law should not lead to the abandonment of fundamentals of constitutionalism and its functions as foundation and limitation of public authority. Public regulation which has no democratic pedigree or which escapes from the possibility of human rights review is clearly against these ideas.