The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

11.1.1.  Tribe’s Version of an Invisible Constitution

In his seminal work, The Invisible Constitution, Professor Laurence H. Tribe 

of Harvard Law School argued that without “the invisible, non-textual foun-

dations and facets of a Constitution,” the constitution itself, even its explicit 

text alone is not able to work properly: “So the visible constitution necessarily 

floats in a vast and deep – and, crucially, invisible – ocean of ideas, proposi-

tions, recovered memories, and imagined experiences that the Constitution 

as a whole puts us in a position to glimpse.”

1

 To him, it is “the invisible 

Constitution” that is “at the center of the Constitution’s meaning and of its 

inestimable value.”

2

 Having said that, the task of understanding and abiding 

by the “invisible” constitution is imposed on not only the judges whose func-

tional task is to interpret the constitution, but also on all the people who are 

abiding by the Constitution.

3

For him, there are two levels of invisibility: trivial and genuine invisibility. 

While “trivially invisible” parts refer to what can be easily made visible by sim-

ple construction of the text, as they are to be regarded as implied by the text 

alone, “genuinely invisible” ones are those “no reasonable reader could claim 

to extract or infer from the text alone.”

4

 He then suggests some examples of the 

1 

L. Tribe, The Invisible Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 9.

2 

Ibid.

, 22.

3 

Ibid.

, 31.

4 

Ibid.

, 28.

11

Is the Invisible Constitution Really Invisible?

Some Reflections in the Context of Korean  

Constitutional Adjudication

Jongcheol Kim

This research was supported by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation 

of Korea (NRF-2015S1A3A2046920).

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Is the Invisible Constitution Really Invisible? 

321

genuinely invisible principles that a “vast majority of educated citizens” would 

agree with in the context of the American constitutionalism: “government of 

the people, by the people, for the people,” “government of laws, not men,” 

“rule of law,” and so on.

5

Quite naturally, he also argued that this invisible part of the constitution 

can be organized or evolved through historical and cultural processes of for-

mation

6

 identified in at least “six distinct but overlapping modes of construc-

tion:” geometric, geodesic, global, geological, gravitational, and gyroscopic.

7

 

Professor Tribe attempted to justify his quest for the invisible constitution 

by saying that “My hope is to nudge the nation’s constitutional conversation 

away from debates over what the Constitution says and whether various con-

stitutional claims are properly rooted in its written text and toward debates 

over what the Constitution does. Put otherwise, I hope to shift the discussion 

from whether various constitutional claims are properly rooted within the 

Constitution’s written text to whether claims made in its name rightly describe 

the content, both written and unwritten, of our fundamental law.”

8

11.1.2.  A Point of Comparison: Dicey’s Distinction 

of Two Elements of the Constitution

In following Professor Tribe’s quest for the invisible constitution, I happened to 

recall a dualist conception of the constitution made by a renowned Victorian 

jurist, Albert Venn Dicey, who has been regarded as a founding authority of 

British constitutionalism. He defines constitutional law or the constitution as 

“all rules which directly or indirectly affect the distribution or the exercise of 

the sovereign power in the state.”

9

 These rules include “all rules which define 

the members of the sovereign power, all rules which regulate the relation of 

such members to each other, or which determine the mode in which the  

sovereign power, or the members thereof, exercise their authority.”

10

 He inten-

tionally used the word “rules” instead of “laws” to “call attention to the fact that 

the rules which make up constitutional law, as the term is used in England, 

include two sets of principles or maxims of a totally distinct character.”

11

 

5 

Ibid.

, 28.

6 

From this observation, it may be assumed that the boundary of the invisible constitution varies 

according to the history and culture of each country it governs.

7 

Ibid.

, 155 ff (Tribe).

8 

Ibid.

, 22.

9 

A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Indianapolis: Liberty 

Fund Inc., 1982) cxl.

10 

Ibid.

, cxl.

11 

Ibid.

, cxl.

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