Good administration “around the track” of the Portuguese and the EU constitutional discourses – “Winds, to entertain our minds”…?

Abstract

To mark 40 years of the Portuguese constitutional project and the 30 years of its interaction with the European (also constitutional) project, the text seeks, through the theme of good administration, to give practicality to the theory of inter-constitutionality – as it is a proposal construed by Portuguese doctrine, which seeks to explain the relationship between the EU legal order and the constitutional legal orders of the Member States. The hermeneutic exercise undertaken aims to extract from the Portuguese constitutional text, through the cross-interpretation of Article 268 CRP with Article 41 CFREU, elements for the construction of a concept of good administration relevant in the Portuguese constitutional legal order that, without prejudice to other dimensions/ projections, is also open to the subjective/protective dimension of good administration highlighted in the EU constitutional legal order. Assuming the European integration process is a dynamic factor of constitutional development, the present analysis regards the systemic differences in the field of good administration as inviting discursive conciliation with an aim to articulate a unity of meaning in the matter of good administration.