The Rule of Law is not a Legal Rule, but a Political and Moral Research Paper

The Rule of Law is not a Legal Rule, but a Political and Moral Principle - Research Paper Example Law so conceived is a set of practical dealings for cooperative social life, using signals and authorizes to guide and conduct channels. British constitution most distinguishing features - federalism, a constitutionally well-established court, a states' upper house, the legislative sanction of treaties, and various other 'checks and balances' were significant innovations, and have over and over again been copied. It was simply in the nineteenth century that Europe began engendering institutional innovations of its own: conscientious parliamentary government, the welfare state, and accountability mechanisms such as the organizational tribunal and the ombudsman. If the rule of law is the rule of the good law then to explicate, its nature is to set out a complete social philosophy. But if so the term lacks several useful functions. We have no need to be rehabilitated to the rule of law just so as to discover that to believe in it is to believe that good must triumph. The rule of law is a political pastoral which a legal system might lack or might possess to a greater or lesser degree. That much is universal ground. It is also to be persisting that the rule of law is just one of the merits which a legal system may hold and by which it is to be judged. ... Rights, on extensive poverty, on racial isolation, sexual differences, and religious discrimination may, in principle, conform to the rations of the rule of law better than any of the legal systems of the more progressive Western democracies. This does not mean that it will be better than those Western democracies. It will be an infinitely worse legal system, but it will outshine in one respect: in its consistency to the rule of law (Dworkin 1986). 'The rule of law' means exactly what it says: the rule of the law. Taken in its broadest sense this means that people must obey the law and be ruled by it. But in political and legal theory of moral principle that has come to be read in a narrower sense, that the government will be ruled by the law and subject to it. The idyllic of the rule of law in this sense is frequently expressed by the phrase 'government by law and not by men'. No sooner does one use these formulas than their insignificance becomes evident. Surely the government should be both by law and by men. It is said that the rule of law means that all government action should have a foundation in law, should be authorized by law.