ABSTRACT
The Constitution of the Republic of Singapore1 declares in Article 4 that it is the supreme law of the Republic. Any law enacted by the legislature that is inconsistent with the Constitution shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be void.2 At first blush, such a clause appears to ensure that questions of legal validity may be resolved by reference to the written text of a posited document, avoiding any reference to vague principles that are part of a ‘higher’ unwritten law of morality, favoured by natural law theorists. The criteria set out in the Constitution become, in jurisprudential parlance, requirements of the positivistic pedigree test that any rule must satisfy in order to count as a valid rule of the legal system. The adoption of a written constitution with a supremacy clause seemingly indicates the victory of, or at least our nation’s decision to choose, legal positivism over natural law theory.
