The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

rope Du Centre Est, 1; ‘The Rule of Law: Pasts, Presents, and Two Possible Futures’ (2016) 12 

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 199. What is distinctive about the anti-positivist 

views discussed above is that they are not simply accounts of the social significance of law, but 

of the legal significance of promulgated legal texts.

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148 

Patrick Emerton

thus changing what people are morally required or permitted to do – not that 

the legal norm obtains simply because it was authoritatively pronounced.

6

However, little argument is provided for this suggestion, which appears to rest 

upon relatively strong premises about the moral obligations of individuals, 

especially those who live in democratic societies, to coordinate their actions 

around highly salient, authoritatively promulgated texts.

7

 And even if those 

premises are true for some places and times, they are not true in general. 

There are many societies in which the promulgated legal texts are not par-

ticularly salient when it comes to social action; or if they are salient, they 

nevertheless do not generate any sort of moral obligation upon individuals to 

coordinate their actions around them (e.g., because of the moral character of 

the government and its legislative programme).

8

 Thus Greenberg’s suggestion 

that, in certain cases, text and law may converge does not contradict the gen-

eral point that, on an anti-positivist account of law of the sort that he defends, 

the meaning and legal force of law depends upon a broader context which, of 

necessity, is not itself expressed within the text: an invisible constitution in the 

manner described above.

5.2.  Constitutions and Rules of Recognition

The remainder of this chapter focuses on a jurisprudential approach quite 

different from the anti-positivism discussed in the previous section. The chap-

ter argues that, within the framework of Hartian positivism, the legal force of 

the ‘visible’ linguistic content of a constitutional text and the laws it validates 

depends to a significant degree upon ‘invisible’ elements of the constitution 

and hence that – as these vary with social and political context – so does that 

legal force.

Central to Hart’s conception of a legal system is the existence of a funda-

mental validating rule of a legal system – the rule of recognition.

9

 In a num-

ber of passages in The Concept of Law, Hart identifies a legal system’s rule of 

6 

Greenberg, ‘The Moral Impact Theory’, Supra note 1, 1342. See also Greenberg, ‘The Stand-

ard Picture’,  Supra note 1, 58–9, for a similar suggestion in relation to Dworkin.

7 

This is suggested by some of Greenberg’s remarks about democracy, texts and de facto authori-

ties: ‘The Moral Impact Theory’, Supra note 1, 1293, 1312–15, 1329, 1338, 1340; and see also ‘The 

Standard Picture’, Supra note 1, 57.

8 

Martin Krygier conveys the outlook of such societies by way of ‘the Bulgarian saying that law is 

like a door in the middle of an open field. Of course, you could go through the door, but only a 

fool would bother’: ‘The Rule of Law: Legality, Teleology, Sociology’ in Gianluggi Palombella 

and Neil Walker (eds.) Relocating the Rule of Law (Portland: Hart Publishing, 2009), 60.

9 

H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 100–10.

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