The ethical foundations of constitutional order: A conventionalist perspective

This paper presents a conventionalist or modified contractarian perspective on constitutional and legal theory as a platform from which to address five important questions about the connections between critical morality and constitutional order. It finds that natural law and critical morality are inappropriately linked to constitutions and laws, but that there is nonetheless a clear moral dimension to all law. Furthermore even though law is explained as a function of human agreements, the very process of agreement commits law to an inherent set of standards which distunguish laws based on agreement from those which rest on coercion. These standards are more familiarly known as the principles of the rule of law.