Do Princípio da Legalidade à Juridicidade. O Sentido Atual das Fontes de Direito Público

di Vasco Pereira Da Silva

We are witnessing today the transformation of a principle of (formal) legality into a material, open and flexible institute, the content of which means the subordination of the Administration to all sources of law. This transformation of legality into juridicity (which began in Portugal as a doctrinal construction and was later adopted by the legal order) obliges to abandon that authoritarian view of the Administration, typical of liberalism, which affirmed the autonomy and primacy of the Administration (and of its own Administrative Law) over all the sources of law, with the exception of (formal) law.
In summary, the principle of legality that began with being merely formal and of restricted content, at the time of the Liberal State, became a material and open principle, in the Post-Social State in which we live, which forces to integrate in its content all sources of law, be they of a supra-legal nature (Constitution, European Law, Global Law, International Law), be those of a legal character (which can be either the law coming from Parliament or from other bodies with legislative power), whether those of an infra-legal nature (plans, regulations, administrative acts and public procurements). As in Constitutional Law, where the existence of various levels of legal pro-tection obliges us to speak in "multi-level constitutionalism", we could also speak here of a "principle of multi-level legality".