Rule of Law - Sage Encyclopedia of Political Behavior Entry

The “Rule of Law” is a political and jurisprudential construct that describes limitations on the ability of a state to impose and enforce legal obligations on its citizens. The ideal of the Rule of Law holds that the state should govern through general and neutral laws that are enforced consistently by state actors who are bound by those legal structures. The antithesis of the Rule of Law is arbitrary exercise of power by individuals, groups, or bureaucracies and other state actors. The classic articulation of this concept is that a political unit should be governed by “the Rule of Law, not of men” with the ideal of equality before the law. Beyond these general propositions, however, there is substantial disagreement over the nature of those limits.

 

In the Western tradition, the historical origins of the Rule of Law go back more than 2,000 years. The Rule of Law ideal requires the sovereign to accept law as a constraint on the sovereign’s interactions with members of the polity. The first serious treatments of the Rule of Law as a limitation on the ability of the state to act outside the law were Plato’s The Republic and Aristotle’s Politics . In Book II of the Politics , Aristotle distinguished states ruled by individuals (such as a monarchy where a sovereign exercises arbitrary power over subjects) from polities ruled through laws applicable to all, including the sovereign. Aristotle observed that all individuals, including rulers, are subject to self-interested appetites and passions that corrupt their ability to exercise power and make decisions rationally in the interest of the overall populace.   Thus the Rule of Law was an essential check on the passions and self-interest.

 

Contemporary Western jurisprudence of the Rule of Law – particularly in common law regimes – typically emphasizes the 19th Century legal scholar Andrew Venn Dicey’s Introduction to the Law of the Constitution (1885) and framed the modern Western jurisprudential debate over the nature of the Rule of Law. Writing primarily about the Rule of Law in England, Dicey proposed that the Rule of Law comprised three basic elements: (1) the predominance of law over exercise of arbitrary power; (2) equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of class or status; and (3) democratic involvement in creating law. In England, Magna Carta (1215 C.E.) agreed to limit the English crown’s ability to impose duties and cost on the English nobility. Parliament later extended Magna Carta’s guarantees by statute to provide similar protections to all English citizens. Magna Carta’s central concepts of protection of individual rights and liberties against state power and the need to limit government action to specific spheres of activity later influenced the United States’ Declaration of Independence, as well as the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights.