Legislative Constitutional Baselines

Abstract

'Constitutional baselines' are interpretive tools that are widely used in constitutional reasoning, although often implicit and unarticulated. They provide standards for measure that enable courts to evaluate the adequacy of the state's provision of constitutionally guaranteed goods. This article identifies constitutional baselines as a distinctive issue in constitutional interpretation, and it examines an important but under-theorised way that the High Court of Australia defines constitutional baselines: namely, by adopting legislatively­defined norms or standards. The best-known example of this is the electoral franchise line of cases: in determining what the constitutional guarantee of re..