The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

stated in certain texts, but rather with the moral requirements that flow from 

1 

It is the contribution of these phenomena to the legal force of the constitution, and of other 

legal texts and practices, that leads me to characterise them as constitutional phenomena.

5

The Centrality and Diversity of the Invisible Constitution

Patrick Emerton*

*  This chapter has benefited from discussing many of the issues raised with Hrafn Asgeirsson, 

Triantafyllos Gkouvas, Joanna Kyriakakis and Dale Smith; from comments provided by Lulu 

Weis, Tarunabh Khaitan and the editors of this book; and from the comments and questions of 

audience members at the International Association for Constitutional Law Roundtable (Mel-

bourne Law School, 2nd May 2016) and the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy Confer-

ence (Melbourne Law School, 23rd July 2016). This research was supported by the Australian 

Government through the Australian Research Council awards DP1092523 and DP140102670.

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The Centrality and Diversity of the Invisible Constitution 

147

the promulgation by certain social institutions of certain texts.

2

 On Dworkin’s 

own account, the moral requirements in question are those principles which, 

in light of the demands that integrity imposes on the exercise of the coercive 

power of the state, would best justify the promulgated texts (together with 

other legal practices);

3

 on Greenberg’s account, the moral requirements are 

those which are caused by certain texts having been promulgated by legal 

authorities (together with other practices of those authorities).

4

 On either 

account, it seems obvious that the legal meaning and force of any legal text –  

including a constitution – will depend upon the social context surrounding 

its promulgation. Furthermore, this context constitutes an ‘invisible’ element 

of the constitution in two distinct senses: (1) it lies outside the text, and yet is 

crucial in determining the legal significance of the promulgated text; (2) it is 

not something that would typically be included in a catalogue of the legal 

phenomena that occur within a society.

5

Nevertheless, in a recent paper Greenberg appears to downplay the poten-

tial gap, on his account, between the visible and the invisible constituents  

of law:

[T]he legislative enactment of a statute may often have roughly the net effect 

of adding to the content of the law a norm that is more or less captured by 

the linguistic content of the legislation. But, when it does so, the explanation 

will be that the enactment of the statute changed the relevant circumstances, 

2 

The italicised phrase is an attempt to capture what is common to the conception of law pre-

sented by Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) 

and by Mark Greenberg, ‘The Moral Impact Theory of Law’ (2014) 123 Yale Law Journal 1288. 

See also the discussion in Mark  Greenberg, ‘The standard picture and its discontents’, in 

Leslie Green and Brian Leiter (eds.) Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2011), 56.

3 

Dworkin, Supra note 1, 90–4, 410–13 (‘the law of a community on this account is the scheme 

of rights and responsibilities that . . . license coercion because they flow from past [political]  

decisions of the right sort’: 93); see also the discussion in Greenberg, ‘The Moral Impact 

 Theory’, Supra note 1, 1292–3, 1299–1303.

4 

Greenberg, ‘The Moral Impact Theory’, Supra note 1, 1293, 1301–3.

5 

The editors, in chapter 1, capture a similar sense of the invisible when they refer to ‘aspects of a 

constitutional tradition that are sufficiently deep or outside the confines of what is understood 

as constitutional within a given system, that they are often overlooked as elements of actual 

constitutional practice’. Martin Krygier’s work on the rule of law has consistently articulated 

the dependence of law’s significance upon extra-legal social phenomena: see e.g., ‘Transitional 

Questions about the Rule of Law: Why, What and How?’ (2001) 28 East Central Europe/L’Eu-