[Human dignity revisited]

Since World War II, human dignity has made its way into many constitutions, bills of rights and international treaties. As its roots can be traced easily back to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and, later on, to the influential Kantian vision, dignity cannot be deemed an entirely new concept. For the same token, it cannot be said that dignity has been entirely alien to the legal realm till 1945. On the other hand, the latest philosophical and anthropological trends, as well as the politicisation of the human being, along with some recent advances in biotechnologies, help to explain its growing presence in the legal world. However, these authors suggest that writing down dignity in legal texts does not fully settle its meaning, not even if such texts are constitutions, and the fact remains that its presence in the judicial reasoning does not always imply being the ratio decidendi, as the study of some relevant judicial decisions shows.