Sovereignty?

I appreciated Fr. Araujo's suggestion that those pursuing CST might do well to consider and pursue the "sovereignty" of a people that has formed itself around wholesome principles.  Analytically, sovereignty is a tough nut to crack, dangerously so.  It enters the political dialect as a bid for a scalar quantity; all and absolute power in one place (unless and until conceded to others).  The impossibility of such a power leads to variously grudging acknowledgments that "sovereignty" is shared (as in "our federalism"), though of course the claims of multiple, ranked sovereigns defy the original notion while continuing to use the word.  Another move is to relocate sovereignty in the people; but if the people are sovereign, it is not in the that older sense of being unbound by the natural and divine law.  "God alone is sovereign," said Maritain; everyone else is under the (natural and divine) law.  One can describe a people or peoples as sovereign, but, with Maritain, I suspect that the original sense of "solutus legibus" is apt to slip back in to do treacherous work.  Maritain's judgment was that the word is Protean enough to be better avoided, particularly when it comes to questions of the legitimacy of claims to self-determination.  The modern tendency to call the law itself sovereign seems benign enough; even the English version of the Compendium (sec. 408), of which I am an admirer, mistranslates Centesimus annus to the say that "the law is sovereign."  But whatever the (considerable) virtues of legal positivism in some of its implementations, CST can hold positive law "sovereign" in only a very diminished sense.  When I hear today's Supreme Court invoking "sovereignty" to justify the denial of adequate legal remedies for state violations of positive legal rights, I suspect that a better analysis.  I know that the concept of sovereignty does good work in some contexts; Vitoria comes to mind.  But the Hobbesian version is always there in the background, too.