Abstract
Any constitutional text, drafted and promulgated to become the founding dogma of a political community and the supreme norm of its entire legal system, actually presents a dual literary nature: as an “Imagined Constitution” and as an “Applied Constitution.” This text was crafted, above all, as an Imagined Constitution; an extraordinary fictional story that seeks to immortalize the cultural and historical legacy of a people and materialize it in the design of an ideal society: the more utopian, the more hyperbolic and refined the text is. The Imagined Constitution is thus the manifestation of a great story that set up the prologue of the Applied Constitution: composed of the entire range of subsequent stories, which take the form of successive chapters once the plot and characters described in the prologue (principles and rules) are interpreted and applied by judges and lawyers. Therefore, the Imagined Constitution contains the founding nucleus of a great story, whose main plot will be developed and broken down into a plethora of secondary plots (Applied Constitution), acquiring the form of a chain novel, as aptly described by Ronald Dworkin.
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Essential Reading
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Talavera, P. (2021). Constitution as Literature. In: Cremades, J., Hermida, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Contemporary Constitutionalism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31739-7_148-1
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