On Fundamental Rights and Common Goals: At Home and Abroad

The article addresses the understanding of ‘fundamental’ rights and their relations to public goals. Do fundamental rights need to stand in stark contrast against the public goals normativized within a legal order? The question is relevant in different ways in the State and in the inter- and supra- national setting. By referring to a notion of ‘fundamental’ rights, the first part deals with the institutional (dis-) embeddedness of rights in the domestic legal orders, an issue which features in winding interpretive paths vis à vis public goals. A second part asks how the relation between rights and goods can fare beyond the State domain, taking into account the main legal transformations of the international contemporary legal fabric and some of its ‘community’- related commitments.