Cervantes, Borges and I: who is the author of the constitution?

• Autor(a) principal: Galuppo, Marcelo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Anamorphosis (Porto Alegre)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.rdl.org.br/anamps/article/view/428
• topic: Law and Literature; Constitution; Framers; Droste effect; constitutional interpretation.; direito e literatura; constituição; constituinte; “mise-en-abyme”; interpretação constitucional.; Direito e Literatura

Literature can teach us a lot about what Law is, such as when we apply the concept of author to understand the development of legal statutes. Such concept presents a challenge for the area of Law and Literature: who is the Constitution’s author, and how is it possible that the reader of the constitutional text may identify oneself as its author? This problem, (which opposes originalists and living-constitution authors) can be better understood if we take the Constitution as a looking glass (mise-en-abyme, or Droste effect): although the framers had made it, it actually reflects the one who looks into it. Therefore, we need to understand the Constitution from the standpoint of the tension between sense and reference (or denotation).