What Is the Rule of Law?

At its simplest, the rule of law contrasts with rule by decree. Under rule by decree, whoever holds power decides case by case. Under the rule of law, decisions follow rules that existed beforehand and apply to everyone.

This includes the government itself. A minister who breaks the law should face the same courts as anyone else, and a government that wants to do something must have legal authority to do it. That constraint on power is the core of the idea.

Lawyers and political theorists generally agree on a set of practical requirements:

• •Laws must be published and knowable in advance
• •Laws must be reasonably clear rather than impossibly vague
• •Laws should not apply retroactively to past conduct
• •Courts must be independent of the government
• •Everyone must have realistic access to those courts
• •Similar cases must be treated similarly

Of all those requirements, judicial independence does the heaviest lifting. Rules mean little if the person applying them can be dismissed, threatened or bribed by the party they are ruling against.

This is why attention focuses on how judges are appointed, whether they can be removed for their decisions, and whether court budgets can be used as leverage. These are technical sounding questions that turn out to determine whether the whole system functions.

There is a genuine debate about how much the rule of law includes. The thin version is procedural: laws are clear, public, consistently applied. On that reading, a harsh law that is clearly written and evenly enforced satisfies it.

The thick version adds substance, arguing that the rule of law also requires the protection of basic rights, since a regime could otherwise follow all the procedures while doing serious injustice. Most working definitions used by international bodies sit somewhere between the two.

The rule of law rarely collapses in one dramatic moment. It usually weakens gradually through changes that each seem technical.

Common patterns include expanding emergency powers that never expire, packing or restructuring courts, writing laws so vaguely that officials can apply them selectively, and cutting legal aid until access to courts becomes theoretical for most people. Recognising these patterns is a large part of what civics education is for.

Several organisations attempt to measure it across countries, most prominently the World Justice Project, which surveys households and legal practitioners rather than relying only on expert opinion.

Their index scores countries on factors including constraints on government power, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, and civil and criminal justice. Any such index involves contestable judgements, but the underlying point is useful: the rule of law is treated as a set of measurable practices rather than a binary that a country either has or lacks.

A famous English case from 1765 shows the rule of law applied to government itself. Officials acting on a warrant from a Secretary of State broke into the home of John Entick, a writer accused of seditious publications, searched it for hours and carried away his papers. Entick sued them for trespass. The government argued that such warrants were a long-standing practice and necessary for the state. The court, led by Lord Camden, rejected this because no statute or recognised legal rule actually authorised them.

The reasoning is the point. Officials could not rely on convenience, custom inside government or claims of state necessity. They needed a legal basis like anyone else, and without it they were simply trespassers. The case is still cited as a foundation of the idea that public power must be grounded in law. It sits in a longer tradition that includes Magna Carta's promise of lawful judgement, and the phrase rule of law itself was popularised in the late nineteenth century by the constitutional writer A. V. Dicey.

A well known American test came during the Watergate scandal. In 1974 President Richard Nixon refused to hand over tape recordings of conversations in his office, which had been demanded by a subpoena in a criminal investigation, arguing that presidential privilege protected them. In United States v. Nixon the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the privilege was not absolute and that he must comply. He released the tapes and resigned shortly afterwards, showing that even the most powerful office holder could be bound by a court order.

Access to courts was the issue in a British case decided in 2017. The government had introduced substantial fees for bringing claims to employment tribunals, and the number of claims fell sharply. The trade union UNISON challenged the fees, and the UK Supreme Court held them unlawful, partly because they effectively prevented many people from enforcing their legal rights. The government had to stop charging the fees and refund those already paid. The judgment is often cited as a statement that a right you cannot afford to enforce is not much of a right.

The American legal philosopher Lon Fuller explained the rule of law through a parable in his 1964 book The Morality of Law. A well-meaning king called Rex sets out to reform his kingdom's legal system and fails in one way after another. He decides disputes one at a time without any general rules, then writes a code but keeps it secret. He publishes laws in language nobody can understand, passes rules that contradict each other, demands things that no one is able to do, and changes the rules so often that his subjects cannot keep up.

Even worse, Rex's officials decide cases in ways that bear little relation to the published rules, so careful citizens still cannot predict the outcome. From these failures Fuller drew eight principles that any working legal system needs, including some missing from shorter lists: rules should not contradict each other, should not require the impossible, should stay stable enough to plan around, and should match how officials actually act. He argued that a system failing badly on any one of them hardly counts as law at all. Critics, notably H. L. A. Hart, replied that a cruel regime could satisfy all eight.

In 1607 or 1608 King James I suggested he could decide legal cases himself, since law was founded on reason and he had reason as well as his judges. According to the account written by Sir Edward Coke, then a chief justice, the judges replied that cases must be decided by the courts. Law, Coke said, needed an artificial reason learned through long study and experience. He then quoted the thirteenth-century jurist Bracton: the king should be under no man, but under God and the law. James was reportedly furious and Coke was later dismissed, but the principle that the monarch could not personally judge cases survived.

Following legal procedure is not enough on its own, as Germany showed in 1933. Weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which let the government make laws for four years without parliament, even laws departing from the constitution. It formally received the two-thirds majority it needed, but only after Communist deputies had been arrested or driven away, with armed paramilitaries filling the building. From then on dictatorship operated through measures that looked lawful on paper. Scholars use cases like this to separate the rule of law from rule by law, in which law is simply an instrument of whoever holds power.

The rule of law means that everyone including government is bound by clear, public, consistently applied rules enforced by independent courts, and it usually erodes through gradual technical changes rather than sudden collapse.