The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective



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The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective by Rosalind Dixon (editor), Adrienne Stone (editor) (z-lib.org)

Germany’s German Constitution 

515


The Court faithfully resolves each of these threshold standards before taking 

up the less-bounded challenge of balancing or weighing interests.

179

17.4. Conclusion



My American law students were relieved to hear the tour guide’s claim that 

the German Constitutional Court was the country’s common law tribunal. 

Implied in the claim was the idea that the entire German legal culture was 

now keyed to the common law. After all, whatever else the American students 

might have understood about their visit to the Court in Karlsruhe, they knew 

that the Constitutional Court is Germany’s most powerful and important judi-

cial organ. The common law – the tour guide wanted them to believe – now 

radiates across all German law. This put the young American jurists on stable 

and familiar ground. It was a different country and a different legal tradition, 

the sentiment ran, but at least when it comes to constitutional law we speak 

the same (common law) language. It must have been the familiarity that the 

tour guide sought to engender with her remark that emboldened that group 

of too-often reluctant students to join the discussion about the Court with real 

interest and vigor. The questions they raised quickly exposed the problems 

with the tour guide’s claim about the Constitutional Court’s common law 

orientation. “Who is the best known justice,” one of the students asked. The 

tour guide explained that the Court’s President often has a significant public 

profile. But she noted that the Constitutional Court’s justices, mostly working 

anonymously and unanimously, do not enjoy anything like the celebrity of 

the US Supreme Court justices. “What was her favorite dissenting opinion,” 

another student asked. The justices of the Constitutional Court are rarely 

divided in their votes, the tour guide explained. And when they are, it is even 

rarer for the dissenters to write a separate opinion. “What is the Court’s pro-

cess for deciding which cases it will consider,” a third student asked. The tour 

guide explained that the Constitutional Court doesn’t select the cases on its 

docket, but must decide all admissible cases. Another student asked, “What 

are the standards the Court follows if it wants to abandon its own precedent?” 

The tour guide explained that the Constitutional Court does not follow the 

common law doctrine of stare decisis. The magic of the earlier moment, stirred 

when the tour guide declared the Court to be Germany’s only common law 

179 

Grimm, Supra note 176, 387 (“[o]nly a legitimate purpose can justify a limitation of a fun-



damental right . . . [T]he German Court asks whether the law is suitable to reach its end[,] 

whether the law is necessary to reach its end or whether a less intrusive means exists that 

will likewise reach the end, and [t]he third step . . . is a cost-benefit analysis, which requires a 

balancing between the fundamental rights interests and the good in whose interest the right is 

limited”).



516 

Russell A. Miller

court, was waning. Maybe it was the bank of clouds that had crept in front of 

the sun and muted the glow of the Constitutional Court’s hearing chamber. 

But one of my students put it more bluntly. “Well,” she said, “this doesn’t 

sound like any common law court I’m familiar with.”

German constitutional law is civilian in character and style. Constitutional 

law has not only been the vehicle for the common law’s triumph over civil-

ian formalism and positivism as the prevailing myth would suggest. German 

constitutional law has also been colored by the still-predominant civil law tra-

dition. This is nothing more than the symbiotic interchange between legal 

traditions that Glenn envisioned. The distinct and continuously evolving mix 

of these traditions – as well as of history, and politics, and culture – leaves us 

undeniably with Germany’s uniquely German constitutional law. It suggests 

that any credible study of German constitutional law must account for the 

German constitutional regime’s civilian orientation, and a potentially infinite 

array of other “traces.”

180

 More broadly, my thesis serves as a warning for com-



parative lawyers who might be tempted to neglect a particular constitutional 

culture’s unique socio-legal frame in pursuit of comparisons that rely on gen-

eralized or universal notions of constitutionalism. It is all marvelously more 

complex than that.

180 

See Legrand, Supra note 20.




517

Appearances can be deceiving, no more so than in the constitutions of states. 

Tribe maintains that the United States Constitution, “at every moment depends 

on extratextual sources of meaning.”

1

 One cannot understand what is going on 



in the United States Constitution, in other words, without having recourse 

to nontrivial understandings beyond the text.

2

 Tribe’s “invisible constitution” 



refers not merely to what judges say the constitution means, and something 

less than the “complex superstructure” operating around the constitution, but 

what is going on “within it.”

3

 Such goings on are informed by “constitutional 



principles that go beyond anything that reasonably could be said to flow sim-

ply from what the Constitution expressly says.”

4

Likewise, Canada’s Constitution easily misleads readers.



5

 The Constitution 

Act, 1867, treated by many as Canada’s first Constitution (though it is not), 

purports to confer absolute authority on the monarch, with the legislative and 

executive branches granted a subsidiary role.

6

 Because British parliamentary 



traditions are incorporated as a matter of conventional constitutional law, 

Canada’s monarch is, in actuality, subordinate while the executive controls 

prerogatives formerly falling within monarchical discretion (e.g., the powers 

Lawrence H.  Tribe,  The Invisible Constitution (Oxford:  Oxford University Press,  2008)  6  



(emphasis in original).

Amar writes that the written and unwritten are intertwined in Akhil Reed Amar, America’s 




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