What is the limitation of a right? What should be taken into account in limiting a right? Should a limitation be conceived as the definition or the infringement of a right? How should the limitation of a right be justified? What does the limitation of a right suggest about the popularly held assumption that no right is absolute? What does it suggest about the relationship between rights and a free and democratic society? What should be the roles of the legislature and the court in limiting the underdetermined rights of the constitution?

Having now arrived at the concluding chapter, I hope that it has become clear how these questions are not merely of academic concern. In one formulation or another, they animate lively debate in legislatures, courts, and other institutions and fora of deliberation in political society. In tracing the contours of constitutional debates and cases of great public importance, one finds that these questions – sometimes visibly, sometimes less so – are at the heart of debate and adjudication in free and democratic societies. Moreover, although these questions are rarely expressly articulated and remain, for the most part, unacknowledged, they guide and sometimes can be decisive in the struggle to answer many constitutional and legislative debates.

We have reviewed how, with remarkable consistency, constitutions leave rights underdetermined, providing open-ended guarantees that ‘everyone has the right to ϕ’ and specifying little more.