Australia’s constitutional rights and the problem of interpretive disagreement

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Australia’s constitutional rights to closer scrutiny. It shows that how the High Court can pursue rights protection through the use of rights-sensitive interpretive devices and judicially created rules for the application of constitutional provisions. The chapter examines the claim that Australia’s constitutional rights are an especially weak form of protecting rights. It argues that a system of rights protection that depends so heavily on the implication of rights, on the incorporation of rights from extra-constitutional sources and other judicially created rules of constitutional law, is inevitably weak. The chapter illustrates that how the Australian Constitution h..