What does “Rule of Law” mean to you?
To me, it means that in the eyes of the law, everyone is equal and equally responsible. Nobody is “above the law,” regardless of any consideration (birth, economic status, wealth, etc.).
Not to me. To me it is conceived in contrast to “Rule of men.” There are 2 aspects. Firstly, the rulers can’t arbitrarily step in and abrogate contracts because they feel like it. Like they do in China. In its fully developed manifestation, we have an independent judiciary. Secondly, law covers wider and wider aspects of society. During the mid 1800s murder rates in Europe and the US were far higher than they were during the crime wave of 1970-1990. Well paid cops are part of the explanation. More recently, I understand that during the 1960s and 1970s many workplace disputes were settled in the parking lot. We live in a more litigious society today, so those habits have died out somewhat.
I feel that what you’re saying is just another way of expressing what the OP said.
If there’s a king or dictator or ayatollah who can issue rulings, then obviously not everyone is equal under the law. You have a society divided into those who can issue commands and those who must obey those commands.
That was is unacceptable, and the appropriate sanctions, are codified.
We are governed by well reasoned and explicit rules, rather than by prejudices and the desire for revenge.
I remember reading East and West by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong. He was conservative, and/but he was very good on human rights. He was no fan of Beijing.
However, he said (paraphrasing), “The Rule of Law is preferable to an absence of same, even if those laws are not good laws, as in China. They are at least a starting point.”
I mostly agreed with this.
In addition to the aspects already mentioned, I feel the law must be attainable to qualify as a rule of law.
You can enact a code of laws so strict that it’s virtually impossible for anyone to obey them. You end up with a system where everyone is guilty of breaking the law. And then you end up with an arbitrary system of deciding who is convicted and punished for the lawbreaking everyone is guilty of.
A valid system of laws should be one which an average person can live within without breaking the laws.
Pretty sure we have that right now, in most countries. Those laws and statutes do tend to pile up over the centuries, and many are of no relevance. I won’t cite any of the stranger ones, simply because it’s been done to death on all those “weird laws” websites and factoid lists.
However, for a less strange one (nothing about not eating lettuce on a Wednesday while wearing purple or anything), you can still be fined for offensive language in my jurisdiction. Telling Australians they can’t swear? The fuck? The law is there, though - and it is usually invoked if you’re being smart to a cop.
Maybe. But I’m not emphasizing the inequality or even the unfairness. I’m emphasizing the difficulty of making plans or investments when your contracts can be upended according to whim. Rule of Law as I perceive it is an aspect of economic development. Contrary to the fears of the founding fathers, democracies tend to be more stable than autocracies, not less. Which admittedly isn’t what I would expect.
Rule of Law is also linked with transparent governments and institutions in my mind. That is to say, less corruption in both the legal and broader senses.
Or, you can enact laws or policies so vague that it’s anybody’s guess just what the law actually is. Then everybody can act in ways they think are proper, only to be stunned when some court decides you’ve all been scofflaws all along.
Or, any cop or bureaucrat with a bug up his ass can shit on anybody, by taking any arbitrary interpretation of some rule. This is often at the root of all those idiotic “zero tolerance” cases we keep reading about. (Like that recent one about the teacher who got suspended for posting a pic of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt.)
Or, the recent ruling by a United States tax court that you can only roll over one IRA a year (not roll over each of your IRAs once a year), stunning the tax law world and landing one taxpayer with $50-some-K of debt to the IRS over a law interpretation that nobody knew. IRA rollover ruling stuns advisers and savers, Market Watch, April 4, 2014.
What if the law states to treat people differently? What you’ve described isn’t the rule of law, but equality, which may or may not be enshrined in law.
To me, the rule of law means that the law is followed even when easier solutions are available. It means playing the games by the rules.
How’d you get so smart?
Recently, I had to hand deliver a misdelivered piece of mail to the house directly across the street. It is small side street with hardly any traffic and, like anyone else, I just crossed the street, in violation of the law. Okay, no one is trying to enforce that law in that situation. But selective enforcement of the marijuana laws is a serious problem in the US. And other drug laws as well. My sister used cocaine for a couple decades (she has stopped) and the last thing she worried about, as an upper middle class white, was going to jail. But it is very different for a lower class black.
My feeling is that there should be far fewer laws, accompanied by rigorous enforcement. That would be a real rule of law.
I just think of AV Dicey.
To me it is a state in which the conduct of a society and all of its members is regulated by a set of codified and enforceable principles and norms. These norms and principles form the basis of said society, without them the society would collapse.
Nothing more, nothing less.
A good example of societies ruled by law would be militaries, where the norms and principles forming “the chain of command” are enforced upon ALL members of the military, from the commanding generals to the new recruits.
I’ve always liked the example of table manners.
In a place like England, if you bend your head down to your bowl, and slurp up your soup, you are seen as something of a pig, and you should be daintily bringing the spoon up to your lips as you sit upright.
In China, to sit upright and bring your spoon all that way through airspace is seen as an insult to your host, as you are being disdainful of your food. You need to bend down and get in there.
In Germany, it is polite to belch heartily after a meal to show contentment to your host.
None of these is wrong. The thing is, they are accepted in a community and are a matter of consensus. In its own small way, this is the rule of law. The customs differ, but there is one thing that is constant and universal: don’t be a jerk.
This. England had “rule of law” even when it was a more serious monarchy than it is today. The law said that the king was better than everyone else, and had rights that other people didn’t have, but so long as it was the law that was saying it, and not just the king, then it still counted as rule of law.
Of course, add in the body of “common law” and “customary rights” and the line between having rule of law and not gets very fuzzy. But when a king did something controversial, people would talk about whether he had the legal right to do that instead of just saying, “oh well, the king’s a douche, whatchagonnado?”.
But having laws and having equal laws for everybody are not the same thing. To me, “rule of law” means that there is a legal system in place and that everybody abides by it, but this system can have built-in differences. In order to be valid, and I’m channeling my daddy here, it must also have the built-in means to clarify and update itself, and these means must be available to all the people to whom the system applies.
That’s apocryphal and I’d strongly advise not to do it.
Really? Cool. I’d be pretty awkward with doing that anyway.