Rule of Law in Austria
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Original Contribution by Harald Eberhard and Konrad Lachmayer. Contact: Dr Harald Eberhard, Austrian Constitutional Court, Judenplatz 11, 1010 Vienna \[harald.eberhard@univie.ac.at\]. Dr Konrad Lachmayer, University of Vienna, Department for Constitutional and Administrative Law, Schottenbastei 10-16, 1010 Vienna \[konrad.lachmayer@univie.ac.at\]._ _ |
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I. General remarks
In a comparative law perspective (Wieser 2005: 85), the Austrian Constitution can be seen as a ”flexible constitution” (Gamper 2008: 96). This goes hand in hand with those concepts of constitutional law that qualify this level of law as a kind of a formal rule of the political process (“Spielregelverfassung”) (Walter et al. 2007: para 3 ss, 146). An extensive use of modifying and thereby fragmenting constitutional law, which describes the status of Austrian constitutional law exactly, challenges the role of constitutional law to give a stable framework for this process (Öhlinger 2005: 274 ss). A lot of so called “constitutional provisions”, which do not contain substantive constitutional questions, do in fact add numerous administrative details to the core documents of Austrian constitutional law. This practice of creating constitutional law became very common in Austria and lead to more than 1.300 constitutional provisions in ordinary laws. As a result, it is common sense in the scientific community that this situation of constitutional law affects its functioning as a basic order of a society in a very intriguing manner (Eberhard / Lachmayer 2008: 113 ss).
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