The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

of Quebec Case.

19

 In analysing the jurisprudence of the Hong Kong Court of 

Final Appeal (CFA), Chan likewise identifies potential strategic, and thus also 

largely non-observable, dynamics underpinning decisions such as the Congo 

Case, in which the Hong Kong CFA decided to refer a question for interpreta-

tion to the Standing Committee of the National Peoples’ Congress (NPCSC) 

in Beijing.

20

 Schneiderman, in this context, also provides a useful methodolog-

ical contribution for scholars seeking to identify this more strategic dimension 

to the invisible constitution: he suggests that by a form of ‘Occam’s razor’ logic 

that strategic explanations are most persuasive where reliance on unwritten 

constitutional principles seems unnecessary to justify the result reached by a 

court, because textual sources are sufficient to justify a similar result.

21

Gabor Toth’s contribution (Chapter 

19

) on Hungary is in this vein as well. 

He shows how the retention in form of the pre-1989 Constitution and the 

subsequent development of a rich jurisprudence based on ‘invisible’ commit-

ments to ‘equality’ and ‘dignity’ ultimately failed to secure liberal democracy 

and progressive constitutionalism in Hungary. This failure he attributes, in 

part, to the deeper underlying sociological facts of Hungarian politics and cul-

ture attention which reveals that the constitutionalism of the Constitutional 

Court could not prevent the emergence of a new form of authoritarianism.

19 

[1998] 2 SCR 217.

20 

Democratic Republic of the Congo v. FG Hemisphere Associates LLC, FACV No 5/2010, 8 June 

2011.

21 

Compare  Rosalind  Dixon, ‘Toward a Realistic Comparative Constitutional Studies? (2016) 

 

64 American Journal of Comparative Law 193.

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The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective 

11

We regard this as part of the value and richness of the volume, though 

where possible we ask contributors to make clear their particular understand-

ing of ‘invisibility’ within the context of each chapter. For ease of reference 

and understanding, we also invite contributors at various points to label their 

understanding of ‘invisibility’ as more or less conceptual versus sociological; 

and unwritten versus extra-textual, as well broad versus narrow (deep/norma-

tive or shallow/formal) and agency-freighted versus self-realising in nature.

1.2.1.  The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Context

Beyond these important definitional and conceptual differences, the contri-

butions to the volume can be divided into three broad categories.

1.2.1.1.  Normative Legitimacy of the Invisible Constitution

One set of contributions focuses on the invisible constitution through a 

normative or theoretical lens. Goldsworthy (Chapter 

4

), for instance, offers 

an important clarification of what we mean by the idea of ‘implication’ in 

a constitutional context. Genuine implications, Goldsworthy suggests, are 

not ‘made’ by judges: they are embedded within the existing communicative 

meaning of constitutional language and are not explicit in that language sim-

ply because they are obvious to any ordinary or reasonable observer. Another 

way of describing such implications might thus be seen as purely ‘linguistic’ 

in nature. Other implications, Goldsworthy suggests, are more freestanding or 

‘fabricated’ in nature: they are ‘made’ or created by judges as a matter of either 

logical or practical necessity, based on other textual or structural features of 

the constitution. Another way of viewing this distinction, as Solum (Chapter 

3

)  

notes, is in terms of a distinction between constitutional implications in the 

broadest sense and a narrower set of implications that simply involve the 

‘contextual enrichment’ of language. Solum points, for example, to four cat-

egories of contextual enrichment of language: ‘implicatures’, which convey 

communicative content that differs from the semantic content of an utterance 

or text; ‘implicitures’, which involve situations in which what he said implic-

itly includes something else that is closely related; ‘presuppositions’, where 

the community of content of particular language is provided by an unstated 

assumption or background belief that is conveyed by what is said; and ‘modu-

lation’, whereby the conventional semantic meaning can be adjusted or mod-

ulated to fit a particular context.

Secondly, while defending implications in the narrower sense, both Goldsworthy  

and Solum provide a clear normative argument against implications in a 

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12