Constitution and the Rule of Law: The Rise of Constitutional Supremacy

Abstract

This article reconstructs the historical formation of constitutional supremacy as a defining feature of the contemporary rule-of-law state. It argues that constitutional supremacy did not emerge as a mere technical refinement of liberal constitutionalism, but as an institutional response to the inadequacy of formal legality to restrain abuses of power—particularly where law itself may become an instrument of systemic injustice. Using a conceptual-historical approach, the article traces the shift from the classical notion of politeia as a political order to the modern understanding of constitutionhood defined by rights protection and the separation of powers (1789). It then examines the democratic and social expansion of constitutionalism in the early twentieth century (1917, 1919) and the post-war consolidation of a human-rights constitutional settlement (1948), in which dignity and fundamental rights operate as substantive standards of legal validity. The argument shows that constitutional supremacy becomes operative through a set of structural guarantees—constitutional rigidity, normative hierarchy, and judicial review—together with rights-protective remedies that render constitutional rights judicially enforceable. Taken together, the trajectory developed here clarifies the rule of law not merely as government under law, but as a legal-political order subordinated to the constitution and to fundamental-rights standards, with implications for contemporary debates on constitutional adjudication and democracy.