Rights and the common good

This is the penultimate piece of the symposium Ius & Iustitium is presenting on the classical legal tradition and the common good. Jamie McGowan’s reply to this piece, the final installment in our symposium, is “On the Tyranny of Rights.” A general introduction to the symposium can be found here. Michael Foran is a Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Strathclyde. Questions relating to constitutional structure, institutional design, legal interpretation and so on are essential to distinguish a constitutional from a political project. Without a theory of institutional design, common good constitutionalism collapses into a collection of political ends, to compete with other political ends in the constitutional arena of the day. Certain constitutional structures or designs are more conducive to the common good than others. Put another way, the common good is not neutral with regards to how public power is constituted, exercised, or controlled