Legal Imbalances in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Critical Analysis of Linguistic and Conceptual Structure

This article aims to provide a critical analysis of the legal imbalances in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, focusing on the structural, linguistic, and conceptual challenges of its articles. The hypothesis of the article is that part of the challenges of interpretability, legislative inefficiency, and institutional conflict in the governance system of the Islamic Republic of Iran are rooted in the formal and conceptual weaknesses of the constitutional text. Unlike previous research that has mostly emphasized well-known ambiguities or executive deficiencies, this study seeks to identify less well-known weaknesses that have not been addressed in legal texts, such as the overlapping of articles, conceptual inconsistency, unnecessary details, lack of a unified writing procedure, insufficient precision in the use of vocabulary, articles lacking added value, and functional ambiguities, and to provide corrective solutions appropriate to the framework of the existing structure for them. The present study seeks to answer two general questions:
1. What ambiguities and deficiencies can be identified in the language, writing, and structure of the articles of the Constitution? 2. Which articles of the Constitution have formal, conceptual, foundational, or content-related problems or challenges? The central issue is that part of the inefficiencies of the governance system is rooted in the internal quality
of the constitutional text; a text that, as the highest legal document, should possess transparency, coherence, and guidance capability, but in practice faces shortcomings that fuel contradictory interpretations, interpretive gaps between institutions, and a decline in public trust. This research was conducted using a descriptive-analytical method and a mixed theoretical framework: on the one hand, Lon Fuller's "internal morality of law" (including eight principles of generality, promulgation, prospectivity, clarity, coherence, possibility of compliance, relative constancy, and congruence of official action with law) has been used as a criterion for coding deficiencies and distinguishing between linguistic, structural, or conceptual reforms. On the other hand, Richard Albert's theory of "levels of constitutional change" (including three levels of amendment, rewriting, and transformation of identity) has made it possible to categorize reform proposals without departing from the fundamental immutable principles (Islamicity, republicanism, and the Guardianship of
the Jurist). Data were collected from the text of the Constitution and its authoritative interpretations and were examined through structural and linguistic content analysis.
A detailed examination of the constitutional text revealed the existence of eight types of imbalances or structural and content-related deficiencies: (1) overlapping of articles (such as repetition of themes of justice, military training, employment, supervision of the Parliament Speaker, and the Administrative Justice Court); (2) inconsistency between articles (such as the duality of "conformity with Islamic standards" versus "non-contradiction with the rulings of Islam" in the duties of the Guardian Council);
(3) unnecessary detail (from numerical qualifications such as "24 hours" and "270 people" to specifying the location of the Supreme Audit Court and Friday as the day for elections); (4) lack of a unified writing procedure (differences in formulating the duties of the branches of government, imbalance in explaining the Army and the IRGC, inconsistency in citing Quranic verses and the condition of "being of Iranian origin"); (5) inconsistent use of terms with the same meanings (dual use of "government" to mean the political system and the executive branch); (6) lack of precision in the use of terms ("Islamic government," "public treasury," "basis of the Islamic Republic," "contrary to right/justice," "proper conduct of affairs"); (7) some articles lacking value (such as official declaration of candidacy, the dissolved supervisory council for presidential elections, and general statements such as the "ideological and popular nature of the Army"); (8) vagueness in
the drafting of the law (functional gaps in the accountability of the President, mutual responsibility of ministers, supervision of the Leader's assets, complaints against the Parliament, permission to use military equipment, etc.).
From Fuller's perspective, these deficiencies distort the principles of clarity, coherence, possibility of compliance, and generality of law. From Albert's perspective, most reform proposals fall into the level of "amendment" (eliminating redundant qualifications, standardizing terminology) and "rewriting" (rearranging articles to resolve functional ambiguities), and none require identity transformation. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite its valuable theoretical innovations in combining Islamicity and republicanism, faces numerous legal imbalances in terms of its internal quality of writing and structure, which have affected its efficiency, transparency, and coherence. The strategy proposed in this article is a scientific and targeted revision through the procedure set forth in Article 177, with the participation of legal experts and with priority given to reductive amendments (eliminating overlaps and redundant details) and progressive amendments (rewriting ambiguous articles and establishing clear supervisory mechanisms). Such a revision, without altering the immutable core of identity (Islamicity, republicanism, Guardianship of the Jurist), both remains faithful to the internal morality of law (clarity, coherence, possibility of compliance) and can strengthen public trust, consolidate the balance of powers, and enhance governance capacity to face future developments. The ultimate outcome is achieving a more efficient constitution as a dynamic and reliable regulator for social justice and national development.