The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

Rosalind Dixon and Gabrielle Appleby

a somewhat narrower class of legal claim, where the explicit basis of the claim 

lies in shared commitments in a democracy to individual freedom and equal-

ity or human dignity and not simply a more instrumental or structural set of 

constitutional commitments.

2

This chapter considers this important dimension to Australia’s ‘Invisible 

Constitution’, and in particular, the possible explanations for this structure– 

rights ‘dualism’ in extra-textual Australian constitutional practice.

3

 One 

potential explanation, we suggest, is legal–cultural in origin, and lies in 

the combined influence of early decisions of the High Court of Australia, 

most particularly the Engineers’ Case, and the choices of the drafters of the 

Constitution regarding the protection of individual rights. Ever since 1920 and 

the Court’s landmark decision in Engineers, the Court has insisted that consti-

tutional implications must be securely grounded in the ‘text and structure’ of 

the Constitution. However, the Australian framers were variously suspicious 

of and unperturbed about constitutional rights protection, and thus the text 

and structure of the Constitution provide limited express support for the pro-

tection of individual rights.

4

A second possible explanation is political–cultural in nature, and is drawn 

from the longstanding resistance among legal and political elites in Australia 

to forms of judicial review that involve open-ended, proportionality-style judg-

ments about the justice or merits of various legislative policies. From the out-

set, views of this kind have been an obstacle to the adoption of rights-based 

judicial review in Australia.

5

  In recent decades, there have also been a series 

of opportunities for the Australian Parliament, and voters, to amend Australia’s 

constitutional framework to introduce greater individual rights protection – for 

instance, by adding express constitutional rights guarantees, or broad statutory 

rights guarantees. These attempts to create capital and small ‘c’ constitutional 

change, however, have consistently failed in the domain of individual rights, 

in large part due to resistance from political and legal elites.

2 

See e.g., Schauer, Supra note 1 (distinguishing between rights in a truly ex post and particular-

istic sense and a more general ex ante-sense). Compare also Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights 

Seriously (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977) (articulating a conception of rights 

is grounded in mutual respect and concern, or respect for equal human dignity). Compared 

to Dworkin, of course, we take a far less definitive view of the relative weight to be afforded to 

rights-based claims, compared to other competing interests.

3 

In this sense we adopt the conceptual definition of the invisible constitution, referred to by 

Dixon and Stone in Chapter 

1

, and a relatively broad view of extra-textual constitutional prac-

tice or influence, which does not seek directly to parse what might be considered as internal 

versus external to legitimate processes of constitutional construction. Contrast Goldsworthy, 

and Solum in Chapters 

3

 and 

4

 of this book.

4 

Rosalind Dixon, ‘An Australian (Partial) Bill of Rights’ (2016) 14 International Journal of Con-

stitutional Law 80.

5 

See e.g., Sir Isaac Isaacs as discussed in 

ibid.

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