Chairs
• Juan José Janampa Almora juan.janampa@uarm.pe
• Arnulfo Mateos Durán arnulfo.daniel.mateos.duran@edu.unige.it

The legal concept of the Constitution presents, preserves, and recognises within its hard core a series of basic concepts of constitutionalism, among which are constituent power, constituted power, and the power of constitutional reform or revision, which have validity within the logic of the Constitutional Rule of Law.

Constituent power, which is responsible for drafting a legal constitution, becomes the foundation of constitutional supremacy; in other words, the people, as the sole holder of popular sovereignty, dictate and approve the constitution. Thus, the moment in which the transformation of popular sovereignty into legal sovereignty occurs is materialised. To avoid reducing either the democratic principle or the legal principle of constitutional supremacy, and rather to reconcile such postures, it is understood that popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy survive indirectly within the text of the constitution. In these terms, the difference between constituent power and constituted power (or between constitutional law and ordinary law) is derived from the legal constitution.

Constituted power can be understood as a power ordered and limited by the constitution, whereas constituent power is understood as a sovereign and unlimited power.

The constitution presented in these terms not only proposes constituted organs as substantive entities inserted into the form of organisation and functioning, but also embodies the procedure of the power of revision of the constitution, which is a regulated, ordered, and limited power. In this sense, this complex and aggravated procedural path has been termed in doctrine as ‘constitutional rigidity’, which, as is well known, is understood as one of the foundations of constitutional supremacy.

The legal constitution in the Constitutional Rule of Law cannot be considered immutable or unmodifiable; on the contrary, to guarantee its constitutional continuity, it must present mechanisms for change. Thus, constitutional reform arises, seeking to organise the process of transformation of the constitution within the logic of the Constitutional Rule of Law. Now, in this context, constitutional reform presents itself as a consequence of the need to adapt constitutions to reality due to constant evolution, as well as the need to resolve the existence of constitutional vacuums derived from the context it intends to regulate.

In that vein, the power of reform—ordered, regulated, and limited by the constitution—comes to perform its functions, above all, contemplating the adequacy between legal and political reality, giving legal continuity to the State, and presenting itself as a basic institution of guarantee.