Constitutional rights comprise a subset of legal rights. A right is a kind of guaranteed or warranted claim, attributed to a person or persons, respecting the conduct of others. The attribution is of a legal right if and insofar as a warrant for it is found in law. Where the warrant lodges in a publicly identifiable body of “higher” or “supreme” law, written or unwritten but in either case binding on everyday lawmakers and unalterable by everyday legislative procedures, it is a constitutional right.

Constitutional rights are required by Rawls’s account of the possibility of the legitimacy of the force of law in a democratic state. Rawls holds that citizens can sometimes justifiably submit themselves and others to the coercion of laws they make democratically, but only subject to the condition that those laws can be seen to conform to the terms of “a constitution the essentials of which all [reasonable and rational] citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse” (PL 217). But since, by Rawls’s argument, a constitution can normally meet that condition only by including – along with provisions for a determinate, democratic structure of government – a roster of “equal basic rights and liberties of citizenship that legislative majorities are to respect” (PL 227), it can be seen that a society cannot be well-ordered by Rawlsian standards unless constitutional rights compose a salient part of its political and legal practice.