Law's Rule: The Nature, Value, and Viability of the Rule of Law

The rule of law is under serious threat, but this book offers a comprehensive and compelling conception of it that provides protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power. It emphasizes the sovereignty of law and equality in the eyes of the law, and is animated by the ethos of fidelity. Part I articulates this conception and locates its moral foundation in a commitment to common membership, while Part II addresses challenges such as finding a place for equity, mercy, and effective responses to emergencies, taming the digital world, and extending law's rule beyond national borders.

Format: Hardback
Length: 400 pages
Publication date: 07 February 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

The rule of law, which was once widely embraced and emulated, is now facing serious threats to its viability. To gain a better understanding, we must return to first principles. This book presents and defends a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling conception of the rule of law, and defends it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force. The rule of law aims to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power through the distinctive tools of the law. Law serves as a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity, providing public expression to an ideal mode of association.

Two principles immediately follow from this core: sovereignty of law, which demands that those who exercise ruling power govern with law and that law governs them, and equality in the eyes of the law, which demands that law's protection extend to all bound by it. The ethos of fidelity animates law's rule, committing all members of the political community, officials and lay members alike, to take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law.

Part I articulates this conception and locates its moral foundation in a commitment to common membership of each person, recognizing their freedom, dignity, and status as peers. Part II addresses serious challenges currently facing law's rule: finding a place in the legal system for equity, mercy, and effective responses to emergencies, taming the new leviathans of the digital world, and extending law's rule beyond national borders.

Weight: 674g
Dimension: 242 x 163 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780190645342