SOCIAL RIGHTS, TODAY

The starting point are the recent catalogues of social rights at various territorial levels. The point of departure for this paper is the new positive legal framework that is currently in force, to the extent that it reflects presentday life needs and aspirations. On the occasion of the most recent statutory reforms and recent Constitutional Court rulings in this area, this paper contributes a reflection on the dimension of decentralization to the already familiar constitutional issues inherent in this concept. The idea is to explore themeaning and scope of social rights from their new positivization both on the supranational level and the level of the autonomous region, while at the same time seeking to avoid their chronic tendency towards a devaluation of regulations. The decentralized implementation of these rights opens up a new field of reflection, a field that has been revitalized by the latest conceptions of social rights stemming from authors such as Alexy and Ferrajoli, among others. The paper's author brings together the old and new doctrinal commonplaces on the subject in an attempt to succinctly describe the current state of the affairs on this question. The paper also attempts to remind the reader that the main issue does not have to do so much with the legal aspects of the positivization of these rights, but rather, with the means for implementation that such rights require. A critical reading of recent contributions to constitutional theory on social rights and their impact on Spanish doctrine also make up part of this paper. The paper concludes by pointing out the need to come up with a new doctrinal framework that will allow for a rethinking of a concept that has been so compromised. Nor is there lacking an allusion to the thwarted hopes represented by the regulatory content of Article 47 of the present- day Constitution.