Transitioning Democracies Through or Beyond Law? The process of Legal Reasoning as a Transformative Constitutional Turning Point

The recent phenomenon of worldwide forms of ‘regression’ of constitutionalism has highlighted the importance of upgrading the comparative constitutional law legal theory from an interdisciplinary perspective. The challenge of this paper is focused on researching the contemporary value of constitutionalism - beyond the traditional one - through the prism of the theory of legal argumentation. It explores an alternative, operational view of post-national constitutionalism dismissing the perspective limited to the constitutional design and incorporating elements that comprehensive studies have revealed as critical factors in the law and argumentation debate: primarily, the crucial importance of independent institutions. As a recognized successful cosmopolitan experiment, the activity of the Venice Commission appears to be a useful starting point for addressing the current new forms of transition and for defining an operational and strategic methodology of legal reasoning, that goes far beyond strict legal reforms. That can bring out a renewed role of constitutional reasoning, a creative legal process based on dialogue and a proactive, dynamic global attitude towards networking, all of which can foster an unprecedented institutional argument for the convergence of constitutional identity and pluralism, as well as a revisiting of the rule of law as a “practical concept”. Strategic foresight to inspire an updated transformative constitutional discourse.