THE INTERPRETATION OF PRINCIPLES IN THE UPDATING OF LAW: THE INTERPRETATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES AS A MEANS OF ADAPTING LAW TO THE CONSTANT SOCIAL CHANGES OF TODAY

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that, among the many ways in which the legal system can be updated to accommodate situations initially unregulated, the interpretation of constitutional principles represents a mechanism that, at the same time, enables law to provide solutions to the increasingly complex social expectations of post-modernity, while maintaining its identity and still functioning as an operatively closed and autopoietic system. To this end, the article begins by introducing basic notions about the concept of a system, in order to qualify the Brazilian legal system as a subsystem of to the social system. It then explores the idea of the complexification of society based on media theory, in order to present the problem to be solved through the interpretation of constitutional principles: providing coherent legal solutions to an increasingly complex society. As a way of achieving this goal, the idea of interpretation as the legal based text production is used to demonstrate how norms endowed with semantic openness - such as constitutional principles - can, when correctly interpreted, encompass the scope of action of the legal-positive system, expanding its capacity for processing normative expectations and thus making it increasingly able to process growing social complexity. Finally, an example is given of the scope of the republican principle, based on the interpretation of the Supreme Court, as a way of proving the initial hypothesis.