A legal order's supreme legislative authorities

Abstract

This article discusses in depth some theses already analyzed in a previous publication and applies the obtained conclusions to legislative authorities. The first purpose of the paper is to determine what kind of rules are those which define a legal order´s supreme legislative authority. With this goal in mind, the article dwells on several distinctions such as those between legislative and customary rules, and constitutive and regulative rules. The conclusion is that the basic rules defining the supreme legislative authorities of every existing legal order are necessarily constitutive meta-norms and have a customary nature. The second part of this article takes into account the different possible contents of the ultimate rules that define legislative authorities. On this basis, four models are distinguished and several considerations are offered in order to characterize the specific model of legislative authority accepted within the constitutional state.