The Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Preamble & the Law

In the introduction to their phrase by phrase analysis of the preamble to the US Constitution M Adler and W. Gorman wrote:

This beautifully constructed, lucid sentence poses direct questions to any commentator - questions about the nature of the action taken, its agent, its purpose, its beneficiary.
[Mortimore Adler & William Gormon, The American Testament, 1975]

The preamble does not have the weight of law. It grants no specific powers to the government to do anything. But it is understood that the preamble represents at least a potential insight into the intent of the founders. Joseph Story [1833] explained in his Commentaries that the provision to "provide for the common defense" could cover any number of gross expansions in Federal power. But the Federal government is limited to those powers self-evidently (if not explicitly) detailed in the Articles. Still, if by chance one had two alternate objective readings of an article or amendment in the Constitution and one reading would provide for the common defense and the other would undermine it, then the first one is the correct one.

We the People of the United States...do ordain and this Constitution of the United States

When this clause was written, the only people of the United States that mattered were the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. However, the constitution they wrote was only a proposal. It had to go the elected representatives of the people of each state to be ratified, and only then would it have the force of law. John Adams, remembering (in his audobiography) the thought-process on how the new government of the US should be established said:

"When the convention has fabricated a government, or a constitution rather, how do we know the people will submit to it? If there is any doubt of that, the convention may send out their project of a constitution to the people in their several towns, counties, or districts, and the people may make the acceptance of it their own act."

Since 1793 [Chisholm vs The State of Georgia] the Supreme Court has cited this clause as proof that the constitution was instituted by the citizens of the U.S. and not the states. This means the constitution is not a protection for the STATES against Federal power but for citizens of those states and in US territory.

This might seem like splitting hairs, but it is an important point to establish since some people claim that certain detailed limitations of the Federal government only apply to Washington DC's relationship with the states and do not limit its power over individuals.

For example, does the right to petition the government only apply to state congresses to petition the Federal government? Of course not. The constitution defines the relation (unless specified otherwise) between the people of the United States and its federal government.

It is distinctly American to say that PEOPLE are sovereign unto themselves. Not just their state and local governments.

...in Order to form a more perfect Union...

Adler and Gorman assert:

The Convention was called because of the pervasive judgment that the Articles of Confederation had failed to bring sufficient unity to the United States, had indeed brought impotence and confusion at home, and dishonor and distrust abroad. Hence the primary motive for the calling of the Convention lay in the hope that means could be found to bring about a more perfect union than the Articles had achieved.

The Articles of Confederation, America's first constitution had failed. There is a defensiveness in this declaration, as with existence of the entire preamble. The Preamble is an attempt to justify the motives of the Constitutional Convention. The patriot, Patrick Henry, who urged the colonies to unite and fight for independence from England and coined the phrase "Give me liberty or give me death!"...that same Patrick Henry refused to take part in the Constitutional Convention because he said he "smelt a rat".

The preamble exists to assert, in a positive way, "Our intent is not to steal the country."

A misuse of this clause, is Pres. Lincoln's when he cited it as justification that the Union of the states was perpetual and no state could choose to secede afterward. But as the black libertarian economist, Walter Williams rightly noted, no state would have ratified the Constitution if it were understood that they could not secede.

Those still harboring doubts about the constitutionality of secession in 1861 should attempt a sincere answer to the question: would the Constitution, as construed by President Lincoln and his allies in all eras, have been ratified in 1788?...No! If that is the case, however, then the dense fog made up of equal parts of Websterian metaphysics and Lincolnesque legalese disintegrates to reveal the truth of Albert Jay Nock’s thesis: the Constitution of 1788 did indeed expire in 1861.
~ Was the Union Army's Invasion of the Confederate States a Lawful Act?

...establish Justice...

contributive justice, commutative justice, and distributive justice.

When organized society, through the laws and actions of its government, renders to its members what is rightly due them, distributive justice is being done.

justice in the transactions between one member of society and another. It is in this narrower conception of justice that the establishment of justice appears to be coordinate with the other five objectives of government stated in the Preamble.

Commutative justice involves correlative rights and duties - rights that one individual claims for himself and demands that others respect, and duties on the part of others to respect those rights - for example, an individual's right to security of life and limb; his right against the invasion of his privacy or arbitrary intrusion in his home; his right against defamation of character; his rights with regard to the acquirement, accumulation, exchange, and conveyance of property. When such rights are legally acknowledged, the laws impose upon all the obligation to respect them. Whereas distributive justice consists in those measures by which the state or organized society renders to each person what is rightfully due him, commutative justice consists in one individual's rendering to another what is due him or is his by right.

When we turn from commutative to contributive justice, we turn from the field of private to the field of public law. Contributive justice involves other rights and wrongs than those covered by the laws of property, contract, torts; it also covers more than the wrongs prohibited by the criminal law. On the positive side, it requires that a man, in his relation to all others with whom he is associated in organized society, should render to them what he owes them in virtue of their common social nature and purpose. He owes them the contribution he can make toward the common good - toward their cooperative realization of a good human life for all. The conscientious direction of his talents to the service of society is an obligation that the virtuous man discharges. It is in this sense that Aristotle spoke of the man whose moral virtue directed him to serve the common good as exhibiting "general justice," reserving the term "special justice" to cover commutative and distributive justice. In the period of this nation's formation, Americans had other words in their lexicon for contributive justice. "The word republic, res publica,"

Links to Recommended Sources

Alder & Gorman, The American Testaiment

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United State, 1833