The prime focus of this dissertation consists in exploring constitutional jurisprudence in the Supreme Court of Venezuela over the last five decades, making use of arguments drawn from Venezuelan history and the existing jurisprudential approaches to theories about the general character of law as integrated in numerous public law cases. This study offers a new approach, one that focuses on ensuring that fundamental constitutional principles are aligned with the concrete objectives (purposes) that the Constitution sets out to achieve. This account is developed through a theoretical framework comprising of: I. A historical overview from independence (1811) to democratization (1947 and beyond), emphasizing the fundamentals of the Constitutions of 1961 and 1999, to portray a vivid and accurate picture of the origins of Venezuela’s constitutional democracy; II. A survey, of constitutional cases that illustrates the evolution of the Venezuelan constitutional jurisprudence under the overt or subliminal use of certain default legal theories, namely, legal positivism in the era of the 1961 Constitution, legal realism and Ronald Dworkin’s adjudication theory in the era of the 1999 Constitution III. An insightful discussion of the main arguments of Ronald Dworkin’s principled theory and Justice Aharon Barak’s purposive theory, in an effort to build theorectical support, which links the various points of their respective theories in order to articulate one in the context of the Venezuelan jurisprudence; IV An original attempt to build a theoretical approach based on the Venezuelan constitutional system, history, culture, and identity to bring together the priorities of formalism, particularly the written principles of the Constitution and the priorities of functionalism and social welfare. This is to ensure that the Supreme Court decides accordingly with the constitutional principles as much as their underlying purposes to provide solutions to legal conundrums.

This thesis highlights the emergence of a wrongful system conception of rights violations. In the modern welfare state, many constitutional rights violations are not discrete, one-off events but instead result from the combined conditions and dynamics of a state-sponsored system. These rights violations are pervasive and ongoing and are detected not through the existence of malevolent intent, but through an assessment of the outcomes and effects of the system on particular groups of individuals. / This thesis explains why wrongful system rights violations can only be effectively remedied through detailed structural reform programs. It identifies the nature and main features of such programs. It asks whether and what capacity the courts have to sponsor these kinds of programs. / The question of court-sponsored structural reform is approached from an institutional competency perspective that focuses on the courts' remedial capacities. Accordingly, this thesis examines the courts' remedial powers---concentrating on equity---and also the courts' remedial limits. / To examine remedial limits, the courts' dominant remedial framework---corrective justice---is examined. The inability of the corrective remedial framework to ground structural reform remedies is discussed, and the disjuncture between court remedial rhetorical and court remedial practice is highlighted. This thesis argues that a strictly corrective remedial framework is inappropriate in constitutional rights adjudication and advocates the development of a broader remedial framework in this field of adjudication, a framework more suited to the development of structural reform remedies.

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Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Köln, 2007/2008. / Includes bibliographical references and register.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göttingen Universität, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral) -- Universität zu Köln, 2006. / Includes bibliography (p. vii-xix).

Thesis (doctoral)--Philipp-Universität zu Marburg.