A written, justiciable constitution, incorporating a bill of rights, is widely accepted as a necessary safeguard against the abuse of power by democratic governments. This book challenges that common view and the often unexamined and erroneous assumptions about the workings of democracy on which it rests. Far from guarding against a largely mythical tyranny of the majority, the checks imposed by judicial review on majoritarian decision-making risk undermining political equality, distorting the agenda away from the public interest, and entrenching the privileges of dominant minorities and the domination of unprivileged ones. As such, legal constitutionalism can produce rather than constrain arbitrary rule, detract from the rights protection of weak minorities, and damage the rule of law in both the formal and the substantive senses of treating all as equals. By contrast, the workings of actually existing democracies promote the constitutional goods of rights and the rule of law. Party competition and majority rule on the basis of one person one vote uphold political equality and institutionalise mechanisms of political balance and accountability that provide incentives for politicians to attend to the judgements and interests of those they govern and to recruit a wide range of minorities into any ruling coalition. From the republican perspective adopted here, the procedures and mechanisms of established democracies offer adequate, if not perfect and certainly improvable, safeguards against domination and arbitrary rule. Most kinds of legal constitutionalism subvert these democratic protections, creating sources of arbitrariness and dominance of their own in the process.