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Mihailo Konstantinović is well known to the Serbian and Yugoslav audience as one of the greatest civil law lawyers of his time. He was active in the state administration immediately before and after the Second World War: first, as a minister in the Cvetković–Maček Government, 1939–1941; then, as a chairman of the 1946 Constitution-Drafting Committee. Prior to the Second World War, he was also legal sciences teacher to Crown Prince Petar Karađorđević II. However, Mihailo Konstantinović was also a politician in the best meaning of that term, a true statesman, more specifically, the chief architect of the 1939 Cvetković-Maček Agreement, which represented an attempt to save the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from breaking up. This article aims to shed light on the role he played in the state redesigning of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and on the complexity of his personality, which was revealed through this role.

Political jurisprudence points out that constitutional court judges sometimes act like political actors, and that their decisions are a function of strategic and ideological as much as legal considerations. Consequently, the proper role of the courts, notably in exercising their review of constitutionality, has been one of the most debated issues in modern political and legal theory. Part of the controversy is also how to measure the interpretative fidelity of judges to the constitutional texts, or conversely, the level of their political engagement. This paper argues for the reconsideration of Aharon Barak's Purposive Interpretation in Law in that light. Barak's work was intended to provide, in the first place, judges and other lawyers with a sort of judicial philosophy -a holistic system of legal reasoning, applying both to the interpretation of will, contract, statute and constitution. Nevertheless, these conventions of legal reasoning, modified and readapted, could well be used also as heuristic tools by the academics in measuring the interpretative fidelity of judges to various sources of law.Accordingly, this paper clings closely to the presentation of Barak's precepts for the purposive interpretation of constitutions, by focusing on the notions of subjective and

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