The political stage is... dominated by... well-rehearsed and deeply felt arguments, on either side... The debate is unending. ...[S]ingle-issue campa… - Laurence Tribe

The visible Constitution... certainly doesn't answer very many of the persistent questions about what it means in any particular case and at any particular time. Indeed, the Constitution even tells us that it doesn't tell us: The Ninth Amemdment... expressly says, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny of disparage others retained by the people." In plain English there's more than meets the eye.

[M]any constitutional scholars, political and moral philosophers, and social and political historians have described over the generations... the "unwritten Constitution," the subject of a classic study by William Bennett Munro published in 1930... "The Makers of the Unwritten Constitution,"... built on a still earlier and highly influential 1890 work by Professor Christopher G. Tiedeman... "The Unwritten Constitution of the United States." ...[S]cholarly work ...lay largely forgotten until ...resurrected in the writing of ...scholars in the 1970s. The focus... responses to the supposedly problematic legitimacy of having unelected and politically unaccountable judges resort to unenacted norms of this "unwritten Constitution" when holding duly promulgated laws and executive actions "unconstitutional."

[T]hese models are not... mutually exclusive... discourse in any given period can... draw on... more than one model. ...Their main function is . ...[T]he models ...grow out of immersion in judicial decisions and lawyers' arguments ...[T]hey should be ...familiar themes ...