View article

In the 1980s, the Princeton political scientist Walter Murphy and his colleagues contended that the question of" What is the Constitution" should be front and center in constitutional scholarship.'Influenced by the growing debate over" unenumerated" and" unwritten" constitutional rights, these scholars argued that the first task of the interpreter is to identify what is to be interpreted. 2 The formal constitutional text may have" significant gaps," which could in turn be filled by reference to other sources that might have" constitutional status." 3 The difficulty comes in identifying what ideas and documents might have that sort of" constitutional status" such that they can be deployed by authoritative interpreters and used to empower or limit government officials. But supplying sources for legal interpreters is only part of the task that constitutions perform. Building on his comparative study of constitutional systems, Murphy came to …