The course covers the study of the organization of the constitutional State, the sources of law, the legal order of the Republic, the constitutional rights and duties, the judicial review (of legislation), and the territorial autonomies.
The main goal of this course is to give students the necessary tools to understand the fundamental notions of Public Law, both horizontally - the relationships between the bodies that shape the form of government - and vertically - the exercise of public authority towards the individuals.
The course is centered on forming a conceptual basis to understand issues in Public Law from a critical, and not merely factual, standpoint. This basis will be developed through the historical analysis of current political issues, as well as through the study of the evolution of modern constitutionalism and of Human Rights.
To that purpose, different approaches to social science will be analyzed in order to better grasp the often precarious relationship between social rights and civil liberties, a relationship most representatively embodied by private property, which went from being the inviolable right of “mono-class” societies to a right governed by social function in “pluri-class” societies.