Law, dissociation and how (not) to solve it

Abstract

In Argentina, our way of relating with the legal system is shaped and influenced by a kind of habituation to the fact that the law is never fully complied with. In other words, we live in a state of dissociation between the normative reality and the social reality. Within this framework, some legal approaches, instead of providing tools to help resolve our contradictions, aggravate them. This paper focuses particularly on a concrete demonstration of this issue in the field of our public law: the idea of the "real constitution". It will try to show that this concept, which calls itself descriptive, is actually much more than that. To do so, it will refer to the not-so-descriptive origins of the "real constitution" idea and will try to show that, even in its most inoffensive version, the "two constitutions" idea pretends to function as a way of defining how law is determined in a society. In the end, this idea of the “real constitution” portrays a clear example of how not to solve our dissociation between normative expectations and social reality.