Egidijus Kūris
Vilniaus universiteto Teisės fakulteto
Viešosios teisės katedros vedėjas profesorius
Vilniaus universiteto Tarptautinių santykių ir politikos mokslų instituto
Politikos teorijos katedros profesorius
socialinių mokslų daktaras
Saulėtekio al. 9, I rūmai, LT-10222 Vilnius
Tel. (+370 5) 2 36 61 75
El. paštas: e.kuris@tf.vu.lt
Summary
The advento of constitutional review and the growth of constitutional jurisprudence in Lithuania stimulated the transformation of the paradigm of constitutional law. One of the essential features of the "new" paradigm is the clear delineation between constitutional and ordinary (sub-constitutional) law. At the same time, there is an undergoing formation of preconditions for distinguishing the norms and other provisions regulating the process of judicial constitutional review of legal acts as a "new" branch of ordinary law – the law of constitutional justice procedure. So far, such branch of law is neither mentioned in the scholarly legal literature nor lectured, as a separate academic subject, for university law students. The legal mind does not reflect it. The concept of this branch of law could include procedures from the reception of a petition in the Constitutional Court till coming into effect of a relevant final act. At the same time, it is worth considering whether the field of constitutional justice procedure shall not be understood more broadly. On the other hand, the explicit statutory regulation of the relevant relations is sparse. This stimulates the jurisprudential character of this branch of ordinary law: the Constitutional Court, while deciding constitutional justice cases, is also creating respective precedents and provides them with doctrinal substantiation, and later consolidates them in its Rules. This is illustrated by referring to the Court‘s practice on ex officio examination of constitutionality of legal acts, determining the priority of cases, joining petitions etc. However, non-intensive and insufficient statutory regulation of the relations pertaining to constitutional justice procedure is a lesser evil than hypothetical "hyper-regulation", therefore, the current statutory provisions shall not be changed for long to allow the formation of a consistent and doctrinally substantiated practice. Constitutional justice procedure law, unlike most other branches of ordinary law which are characterized by a far greater intensiveness of regulation, is growing due to the Constitutional Court’s development of its jurisprudence.