Read more
The rule of law, once widely embraced and emulated, now faces serious threats to its viability. To answer these fundamental threats, we first must return to its foundational principles. This book articulates a coherent framework and foundation for thinking about the rule of law and planning strategies for building and defending it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force.
List of contents
- Prologue
- PART I CORE AND CONSEQUENCES
- Chapter 1 The Idea of the Rule of Law
- Chapter 2 Power, Accountability and Law's Toolbox
- Chapter 3 Rule of Law's Principles: Sovereignty, Equality and Fidelity
- Chapter 4 Moral Foundations
- Chapter 5 Rule of Law's Partners: Democracy, Rights and Justice
- Chapter 6 Realizing the Rule of Law
- Chapter 7 Conditions and Limits
- Chapter 8 Threats to Law's Rule
- PART II CHALLENGES
- Chapter 9 A Dialectic of Deference and Dissent
- Chapter 10 The Trust Challenge
- Chapter 11 Dilemmas of Discretion: Equity and Mercy
- Chapter 12 Lawful Lawlessness: Crisis and Pardon
- Chapter 13 Digital Domination: Taming the New Leviathans
- Chapter 14 AI in Law or in Place of Law?
- Chapter 15 Rule of Law Beyond Borders
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Endnotes
About the author
Gerald J. Postema is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Athens. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (2013-13); a Guggenheim Fellow (2005-6); a Rockefeller Fellow, Bellagio (2001); and a Fellow of the Netherland Institute for Advanced Studies (1996-7). He has held visiting posts at the University of Cambridge, the European University Institute (Florence), the University of Athens, Yale University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Summary
The rule of law, once widely embraced and emulated, now faces serious threats to its viability. To get our bearings we must return to first principles. 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 power using the distinctive tools of the law. Law provides a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity and giving public expression to an ideal mode of association. 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, 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.
