Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 88 No. 1, 2018.
Original scientific paper
A Critique of the Conception of Justice Adopted in the Decision of the Constitutional Court on the So‑called »Abortion Law«
Petar Popović
orcid.org/0000-0001-5282-0850
; Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Roma, Italy
Abstract
This article analyses the 21 February 2017 decision of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia on the accordance of the so‑called »Abortion Law« from 1978 with the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia. The analysis proceeds from a specific perspective of legal philosophy, but also includes broader philosophical issues of establishing a conception of justice for the interrelation between law and morality. The author extrapolates certain guiding principles from the rationale of the Court’s decision in order to synthesize the main features of the argumentative frame of justice adopted by the Court. These guiding principles are then identified as being very similar to the principles of the political conception of justice, famously established by John Rawls in his political philosophy. The author then critically assesses certain anthropological implications and the background view of the human person underlying the Rawlsian argumentative frame of justice, which focuses on the central concept of unencumbered freedom of a wholly autonomous »self«. After indicating numerous deficiencies of an approach to the legal regulation of abortion which is grounded in a »negative« anthropology, the author indicates certain characteristics of an alternative conception of justice which would adopt the juridical dimension of the »positive« determinations of anthropology of the human person as the point of departure.
Keywords
constitutional law; Constitutional Court; teleological interpretation; abortion; right to life
Hrčak ID:
200755
URI
Publication date:
29.5.2018.
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