Human needs as the foundation of legal regulation: Concept, essence, classification, and related terminology
Palabras clave:
Human Needs, Legal Regulation, Human Dignity, Social Rights, Legal Institutionalization, International Human Rights Law, Constitutional LawResumen
The purpose of the article is to explain how needs-related conditions acquire legal relevance within selected European judicial reasoning without being transformed into autonomous subjective rights. The study was conducted in 2024–2025 as a doctrinal and interpretative legal inquiry focused on selected case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. International human rights instruments and the Constitution of Ukraine were used only as contextual normative materials for clarifying the legal categories applied in the examined judicial reasoning. The case-law sample consisted of eight purposively selected decisions: five ECtHR cases and three CJEU cases. The research shows that a need, in the limited doctrinal sense used in this article, may be understood as an objectively significant condition of existence, agency, or participation that becomes legally relevant only through recognized legal forms, including dignity, rights, guarantees, state obligations, vulnerability assessment, minimum standards of protection, and judicial review criteria. The article distinguishes need, interest, value, dignity, and vulnerability as related but non-identical categories with different legal functions. It also develops a limited functional typology of protected conditions reconstructed from the examined materials: existential, socio-economic, autonomy-related, equality and inclusion-related, and protective needs. The analysis identifies five analytical forms of legal transformation observed within the selected sample: axiological, normative, threshold-based, interpretive, and institutional. The selected ECtHR cases mainly show dignity-related threshold reasoning, while the selected CJEU cases more often reveal the role of equality, citizenship, participation, and proportionality. The findings demonstrate that needs-related conditions matter in the examined materials as mediated legal criteria, not as direct sources of law. Therefore, the results should be read as a focused doctrinal reconstruction of selected European judicial patterns rather than as a comprehensive theory of human needs in law.
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