Investors, public employees, students and pensioners: who “trusts” in constitutional case-law?

Abstract

The article focuses on the Portuguese Constitutional Court recent case-law on the principle of legitimate expectations, aiming to highlight the legislator’s difficulties in passing some structural reforms in a great number of issues. The idea is to follow the first three “tests” of the methodological path which orientates the review led by the Court: unpredictability, legitimacy and irreversibility. Our analysis enables the conclusion that, once the Court verifies the first test by determining that the legislator has behaved in such a way as to generate expectations of continuity, the remaining tests will not be an obstacle in establishing that those expectations are worth of protection. In our view, this is because expectations are presumed to be legitimate as long as they are based on previous legislative activity, even if their normative foundations are irremediably compromised.