Ronald Dworkin wishes to read the UNITED States' constitution in terms of political principles, treating it as a source of law deriving from these. But the terms of the constitution, where they are not institutional, are mostly prohibitions and as such do not prescribe rights. Indeed the constitution on the whole does not prescribe rights, but instead refers to or enumerates rights which it does not prescribe. There are exceptions in the fifth and sixth Amendments, but as these explicitly prescribe rights this implies that the other constitutional terms are not prescriptive in this way. The view presented in this article, however, does not endorse the original intention thesis.

There is a third way of reading the constitution. This is in terms of the most prominent though most neglected part of the text, the preamble. This approach provides a reading which is inconsistent with the original intention thesis in that the categories of the preamble are so general that they cannot be confined to purely eighteenth century meanings. The third way is also inconsistent with Dworkin's, because the constitution provides no prescriptive principles except in its preamble, and those do not correspond to the range of prescriptions Dworkin has in mind. The third way suggests we need to read the Articles and Amendments of the constitution in terms of the preamble, and to address specific issues in these terms. This reading embraces inter alia a far wider range of political concerns than Dworkin has addressed and implies a modification of the type of liberalism he has developed.