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Rhetorics of “the People”: The Supreme Court, the Social Contract, and the Constitution

This article explores the federal judiciary's use of eighteenth–century social contract theory in United States v. Verdugo–Urquidez (494 US 259) to interpret the constitutional rhetoric of “the people” for our time. The principal version of social contract theory at play in Verdugo recalls a republican ideology which forms an old and volatile current in American political thought, an ideology which supports a far more exclusionary standard of membership in the nation than has obtained for most of this century, and which has important implications for the construction of political authority it is enlisted to support.