Grundrechtswandel

While an open society is in constant flux, fundamental rights embody legal continuity and stability. As the Basic Law grows older, the question of the constitutional permissibility of change in the realm of fundamental rights moves increasingly to the forefront. The recent debate over same-sex marriage illustrates this development. Traditionally, change in constitutional and fundamental rights change has often been discussed as an issue of the separation of powers or of interpretive methodology. Markus Gaßner, however, adopts an approach grounded in the theory of fundamental rights to avoid unproductive dualisms. To this end, he contrasts a widely held statist-positivist understanding of fundamental rights with the theoretical claim that fundamental rights operate through society. According to this view, fundamental rights protect the inherent normativity and internal dynamism of social institutions and spheres of practice. Change in fundamental rights thus entails a transformation of their content brought about by the evolutionary effects that the exercise of those rights has on the social institutions they protect. On this basis, the role and function of constitutional legislation and constitutional adjudication, as well as methodological questions, are reconstructed anew. The constitutional legislator provides the wording of fundamental rights, but not their meaning. Yet this meaning is not simply determined through judicial elaboration either. Rather, the interpretation of fundamental rights occurs primarily through social practice, to which legal interpretation must respond in a receptive and adaptive manner.