What Kind of Future for Public Law is being Prepared Today?

What Kind of Future for Public Law is being Prepared Today?

Maria da Glória Garcia

Law Faculty, University of Lisbon and Portuguese Catholic University

This paper is a reflection on the future of public law which, as we all know, is be­ing prepared today. It begins with recent research in the field of cognitive psychol­ogy, coming to the conclusion that human beings have perfected, in the course of history, their intellectual capacities in what concerns memory and the understand­ing of the past but have not trained the capacities of forecasting, of working with probabilities, of predicting the future and the consequences of phenomena in their syn­ergies. With that in mind, we can better understand the reason why societies have difficulties in managing the increased risks they are facing, as well as in deal­ing with terrorism and with the uncertainty that surrounds the evolution of the en­vi­ronment and of economic and financial reality. With that in mind, we can also understand the reason why the traditional political powers find it hard to use the es­tab­lished law instruments. The paper addresses the issue of a new beginning for pub­lic law and the ongoing silent political revolution aimed at finding ways in which to live in freedom and equality with the guarantee of the sustainability of de­vel­opment in a global society: to reinvent the political decision process, to find new dimensions in the exercise of power in society (governance) guided by com­munal ethics in a multilevel citizenship..., to reconstruct the rule of law and the pub­­lic policies state.