Limitations on the powers of government

Settling who gets to make decisions is still not enough on its own. Imagine the group has now decided who holds the authority to make the rules — but that authority then goes on to pass laws that are plainly unjust: banning the practice of a particular religion, dictating what colours people may wear, forbidding certain songs, forcing members of one caste or religious group to serve others without ever being allowed to own property, letting the government arrest people arbitrarily, or restricting who may draw water from a well based on skin colour. Even though such laws might have been passed by a government that came into being through a perfectly legitimate procedure, they would still be obviously unjust — which shows that specifying who has authority to decide is not, by itself, enough to guarantee a just or livable society.

This is why constitutions perform a third function: they place limits on what a government is allowed to impose on its own citizens, limits that are fundamental in the sense that the government may never cross them, however it was created. The most common way constitutions do this is by naming certain fundamental rights that every citizen possesses and that no government may violate — protection from arbitrary arrest, and basic liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and freedom to conduct a trade or business. The precise list and the exact interpretation of these rights differs from constitution to constitution, but nearly every constitution protects some such basic cluster. In practice, these rights can be curtailed during a genuine national emergency, but even that is not left to the government's own discretion — the constitution itself lays down the specific circumstances under which such rights may be withdrawn. A cartoonist's own commentary on this same difficu …