Abstract: This article begins with a broad-brush survey of the doctrinal play of public/private in constitutional law. It then turns to the question of a public/private ‘ghost’ presiding from behind the scenes over all the public/private coding we meet on stage — shaping it, guiding it, imbuing it with point and purpose: some master spirit, then, whose sundry outcroppings in institutional design and doctrinal construction could be expected both to vary and to converge in interestingly describable and classifiable ways across instances of the legal forms and practices labelled as ‘constitutional’.