Rethinking Constitutional Legitimacy in Light of the Readings of Jürgen Habermas and Alessandro Ferrara

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Assistant Professor, Public and International Law Dept, Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran.

10.22091/cpl.2026.15839.1121

Abstract

 One of the fundamental tensions in constitutional law concerns constituent power, which is traditionally associated with the founding moment and the will of the founding generation, whereas intergenerational justice evaluates constitutional legitimacy across time and holds it accountable to the rights and freedoms of future generations. The central question is how a constitution that relies on the historical consent of its founders can simultaneously justify the democratic self-legislation of the present people and the obligation to preserve the conditions of freedom for the future. This article rethinks constitutional legitimacy through the tension between two theoretical logics: Habermas’s procedural account of legitimacy, which links constitutional validity to democratic autonomy, public participation, and communicative processes of norm production; and Ferrara’s account of sequential sovereignty, which emphasizes intergenerational constraints on the power of constitutional amendment. The research adopts a conceptual-normative method and an interpretive analysis of theoretical texts. The article argues that intergenerational constraints can be justified only if they are reconstructed not as external substantive limits on democratic will, but as conditions for preserving democratic self-legislation across time. Its main finding is the model of intergenerational constituent power, according to which constitutional legitimacy is an ongoing democratic process that must preserve both the possibility of constitutional amendment and the future capacity for collective self-determination.

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Journal of Comparative Public Law
Volume 3, Issue 1 - Serial Number 9
March 2026
Pages 125-152

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