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

"The rule of law, once widely embraced and emulated, now faces serious threats to its viability. This book articulates 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's ambition, it argues, is to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of governmental and non-governmental power using the distinctive tools of the law. Two principles immediately follow from this core: sovereignty of law, demanding that those who exercise ruling power govern with law and that law governs them, and equality in the eyes of the law, demanding that law's protection extend to all bound by it. Animating law's rule, the ethos of fidelity commits all members of the political community to take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law. The rule of law is realized in constitutional principles of separation of power, procedural fairness, freedom of media and association, and a network of mechanisms of accountability within government and civil society. The rule of law underwrites democracy and human rights. 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"--