نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
دانشگاه باقرالعلوم(ع)
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
More than four decades after the adoption of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, social, cultural, technological, and legal transformations have made it increasingly necessary to revisit certain provisions and structures of this foundational document. In comparative practice, “active constitutional maintenance” is common: many countries, through formal mechanisms—such as amendment clauses, supermajority thresholds, referendums, or revision councils—periodically conduct linguistic pruning, resolve conflicts, and update concepts. The aim is not an identity rupture, but the preservation of the text’s effectiveness in the face of rapid societal and technological change. In Iran, too, Article 177 lays out a lawful and legitimate pathway for revision and enables targeted reforms within the preservation of Islamicity and republicanism. From this vantage point, the present inquiry proceeds according to the same logic of maintenance and optimization of the text.
This article focuses on a lesser-studied dimension—the conceptual and linguistic structure of constitutional principles—and undertakes a critical textual analysis, a domain that, unlike institutional and implementation-oriented critiques, has drawn little attention in Iran’s public-law scholarship. The central question is which principles exhibit linguistic and conceptual deficiencies and how these deficiencies affect the Constitution’s legal and political effectiveness. The article hypothesizes that part of the challenges of interpretability, legislative inefficiency, and institutional conflict in the governance of the Islamic Republic of Iran originates in formal and conceptual weaknesses of the constitutional text itself.
The theoretical framework rests on two pillars: first, Lon Fuller’s “inner morality of law,” which provides criteria—lexical clarity, textual coherence, non-contradiction, enforceability, and relative stability—for assessing textual quality; and second, Richard Albert’s distinction between “amendment” and “identity-altering transformation” (often termed constitutional dismemberment), which demarcates revisions permissible under Article 177 from changes that would endanger the Constitution’s core identity (Islamicity, republicanism, and the Guardianship of the Jurist [Velayat-e Faqih]). On this basis, the proposals are organized at three levels—editorial, reductive (streamlining), and enhancement (upgrading). The research method is descriptive–analytical; the findings are classified into eight categories, and for each category a tailored three-tier remedy is offered. The conclusion is that rigorous, purpose-driven revision—within Article 177 and guided by Fuller’s criteria and Albert’s demarcation—can increase conceptual clarity, strengthen legal coherence, build public trust, and reinforce the Constitution’s regulatory function.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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