The Rule of Law

The rule of law is a durable system of laws, institutions, and

community commitment that delivers four universal principles:
Accountability
The government as well as private actors are accountable under
the law.
Just Laws
The laws are clear, publicized, and stable; are applied
evenly; and they protect fundamental rights, including the
security of persons and contract, property, and human rights.
Open Government
The processes by which the laws are enacted, administered,
and enforced are accessible to all, fair, and efficient.
Accessible & Impartial Dispute Resolution
Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and
independent representatives and neutrals who are accessible,
have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the
communities they serve.
Rule of law, the mechanism, process, institution, practice,
or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law,
secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally
prevents the arbitrary use of power.
Ideas about the rule of law have been central to political
and legal thought since at least the 4th century BCE,
when Aristotle distinguished “the rule of law” from “that of any
individual.” In the 18th century the French political
philosopher Montesquieu elaborated a doctrine of the rule of law
that contrasted the legitimate authority of monarchs with
the caprice (impulse) of dictators. It has since profoundly
influenced Western liberal thought.
In general, the rule of law implies that the creation of laws,
their enforcement, and the relationships among legal rules are
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themselves legally regulated, so that no one—including the most
highly placed official—is above the law. The legal restriction on
rulers means that the government is subject to existing laws as
much as its citizens are and that no legal person
shall enjoy privileges that are not extended to all and that no
person shall be immune from legal sanctions.
In particular, laws should be open and clear, general in
form, universal in application, and knowable to all. Moreover,
legal requirements must be such that people are able to be
guided by them; they must not place undue cognitive
(reasoning) or behavioral demands on people to follow. Thus, the
law should be relatively stable and comprise determinate
requirements that people can consult before acting, and legal
obligations should not be retroactively established. Furthermore,
the law should remain internally consistent and, failing that,
should provide for legal ways to resolve contradictions that can
be expected to arise.
The rule of law is the legal principle that law should
govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by arbitrary
decisions of individual government officials. It primarily refers to
the influence and authority of law within society, particularly as
a constraint upon behavior, including behavior of government
officials. The phrase can be traced back to sixteenth-century
Britain, and in the following century, the Scottish theologian
Samuel Rutherford used the phrase in his argument against the
divine right of kings. The concept, if not the phrase, was familiar
to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, who wrote, “Law
should govern.”
Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law,
including lawmakers themselves. In this sense, the rule of law
stands in contrast to an autocracy, dictatorship, or oligarchy
(government by a small group of people), in which the rulers are
held above the law. Lack of the rule of law can be found in both

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democracies and dictatorships, because of neglect or ignorance
of the law. The condition of rule of law is rapidly deteriorated, if
a government has insufficient corrective mechanisms for its
restoration.
The rule of law system in Pakistan is established in the
Constitution of Pakistan. The present Pakistani Constitution itself
became the law of the land since 1973. The way in which the
Constitution is applied, has always been subject to court
interpretation. As circumstances and public opinion evolve
through the years, the interpretations offered by the courts meet
the situation accordingly. From time to time, it even becomes
necessary to amend the Constitution to keep pace with changes
in the country’s beliefs and values.
How Laws Benefit Society
Without laws, we would lose these three benefits.

1. People would have no incentive to follow group

behaviour,

2. We would have no accepted authorities who can

resolve issues, and

3. There would be no means to legally and justly punish

people.

Without law, we would have numerous problems including

uncertainty, stasis (motionless), or inefficiency. But with law,
we are able to produce country-wide accepted standards,
accepted positions of power, and accepted standards of
punishment. Any society, under the rule of law, will be more
organized and rational as a result of slow, methodic, and
deliberate reflection upon the rules for behaviour, accepted
officials, and the punishments.

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 Rules for Behavior: -

The advantages of having designated rules for behaviour

are numerous, but to name a few:

 A source of conflict resolution,

 A priori set of rules for conflict resolution,
 Forced conformity
When we have rules for behaviour, we necessarily have
agreed upon standards to reference. That is, when a conflict
arises, we can definitely say, in most cases, who was right
and who was wrong.

When a conflict would arise within society, we can refer

our rules. For instance, when the families split-up, the courts
determine that who would get what resources. Rather than
rely on social customs, we have the benefit of laws to
determine how things ought to be separated. Laws provide us
with means to resolve conflicts.

In addition to the rules of law being a source to resolve

the conflicts, the law allows us to also determine standards of
behaviour before the occurrence of any event. The advantage
of doing so relates to power. That is, if rules for behaviour
were determined after the event, that is, after an event had
occurred, then the rulers could create law to suit their own
interests. The fact that law is created before the fact means
no legislator or law maker can produce outcomes which are
deeply favourable to them, or it, at least, becomes far more
difficult to do so. Thus, another advantage of law is that no
one can create a law which will benefit them in some future
scenario, so long as the laws are produced before the fact or
event.

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 The last advantage to having rules for behavior is forced
conformity. When we lack rules for behavior, we rely on our
social customs; however, these social customs are not
enforced. If they were, they would be laws; and so, in a
lawless society, no social custom would be enforced. Without
rules for behavior, we lack a forced conformity. And without
forced conformity, people can engage in divergent behavior,
especially of the sort that harms society rather than
expresses individual differences.

Hammurabi writes about the Rule of law “to bring about

the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and
the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.”
Another benefit of having laws relates to positions of
authority. Laws can do the following:

 Determine who interprets the law

 Determine who can create new law
If we think about the game of soccer, we can recognize
that it is up to the referees to determine who violates the
rules. Such circumstances ensure that neither team can
selectively apply the rules, as the referee is only interested in
applying the rules rather than using the rules to help one
team win over the other.

Without the designated referee, then the teams would

have to fight with one another about how the rules should be
interpreted. Similarly, when we have laws, we need to
determine who is to interpret them. We cannot simply rely on
crowds of people or social custom to determine the
application of law, as there would be bias.

Instead, we would need rules to confer powers to

specific individuals, such as the rules within the constitution.
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The various articles of the constitution not only determine
who is to interpret and create law, but they also lay out the
processes by which one must abide in order obtain the
outlined powers. This method ensures that not just anyone
can have legal power, but it also determines how much power
someone is allowed to have.

Institutions and Legal Culture

The rule of law is best seen not as a blueprint for institutional
design but as a value, or cluster of values, that might inform such
a design and that can therefore be pursued in a variety of ways.
Nonetheless, several simple and generalizable institutional
insights follow from the idea that those who judge the legality of
exercises of power should not be the same as those who exercise
it. For instance, a typical rule-of-law state will institutionalize
some means of shielding legal officials from interference,
political or otherwise, that threatens their independence.
Accordingly, the institutional separation of the judiciary from
other branches of government is commonly thought to be an
important feature of rule-of-law states. Other measures to ensure
fair access to legal institutions may also be important for rule-of-
law regimes. In addition, a binding written constitution is widely
believed to aid the rule of law and has been adopted by most
states of the world.
The rule of law is tied neither to any one national
experience nor to any set of institutions in particular, although it
may be better served in certain countries and by some
institutions. Moreover, the institutional arrangements that
ensure the rule of law in one polity might not be easily
duplicated in or transplanted to another. Nonetheless, the initial
sociological condition for the rule of law is shared across
cultures: for the rule of law to be more than an empty principle,
most people in a society, including those whose profession it is to

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administer the law, must believe that no individual or group
should be above the law.

Challenges to The Rule of Law

Only to think that to bring the right people in power,

without having the measures how to constrain the power, is the
actual consideration of politics, does not convince the wisdom
about the value of the Rule of Law. For the majority of
modern democratic societies, the value relates to the
requirement that both rulers and the ruled be accountable to the
law. In the modern world, it is the liberal tradition that gives
high values to the rule of law.
The concept of the rule of law is not a description of any
setup but it is a very complex idea. Thus, there is reason to be
doubtful about whether societies necessarily benefit from all that
might be raised under the term. The independence of
the judiciary, for instance, is clearly a problem if the
independence is misused or to allow unchallenged
interpretations of the law. Critics of a strictly
formal conception of the rule of law argue that too much
attention to legal process creates many evils in the form of
exaggerated legalism and neglect of the political or real-world
dimensions of legal conflicts. They say that the increasing
domain of judges and lawyers—certainly, their encroachment
into areas previously left to politicians and the electorates—
involves the loss of much that is politically and democratically
valuable.
Too much emphasis on procedures for preventing
arbitrariness can lead to subverting the justice, what otherwise,
might find support in the rule of law. In that case the legal
criticism becomes itself a form of arbitrariness that is no
more legitimate. The rule of law cannot be complete without

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some philosophical reflection on law, including on its purpose
and meaning.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle was an empirical political philosopher. Like Plato,
he likes balance and moderation and aims at a harmonious city
under the rule of law. Like Plato, Aristotle thinks in terms of the
city-state, which he regards as the natural form of civilized life,
social and political, and the best medium in which human
capacities can be realized. He defines man as a “political
animal,” distinguished from the other animals by his gift of
speech and power of moral judgment. “Man, when perfected,” he
writes, is the best of animals, but when separated
from law and justice, he is the worst of all, since armed injustice
is the most dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms
of intelligence and wit, moral qualities which he may use for the
worst ends.
Since all nature is made for a purpose and humans “aim at
the good,” the city-state, which is the highest form of
human community, aims at the highest good. Like sailors who
have their separate functions, but they have a common object
i.e., the safety in navigation, the citizens too have a common aim
i.e., survival, security, and the enhancement of the quality of life.
The rule of law is preferable to that of a single citizen rule;
if it be the better course to have individuals ruling, they should
be made law guardians or ministers of the law.
He attacks oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.
Under democracy, he argues, manipulators attain power by
bribing the electorate and waste the accumulated state wealth.
Aristotle hates the tyranny, the arbitrary power of an individual
is above the law and he is responsible to no-one and who governs
all alike with a view to his own advantage and not of his subjects,
and therefore against their will. No free man can endure such a
government.

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 Aristotle accepts a conservative and hierarchical social order.
He states that public power should aim at promoting the good
life through the rule of law and justice.
Cicero and the Stoic; - Since the city-state was no longer self-
sufficient, universal philosophies developed that gave people
something to live by in a wider world.

Cicero defined the republic as an association held together

by law. He has asserted, like Plato, that government is
sanctioned by a universal natural law that reflects the cosmic
order. Cicero expresses the pre-Christian Stoic attempt to
moralize public power, apparent in the challenging sense of
public responsibility shown by the emperors Hadrian and Marcus
Aurelius in the 2nd century CE.

St. Augustine
St. Augustine wrote the book ‘City of God’ (413–426/427),
when the empire was under attack by German tribes. He sums
up the conflict between “matter” and “spirit” resulting
from original sin and the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden
and defined a new division between church and state.
From the Stoics and Virgil he adopted a serious sense of
duty, from Plato a dislike for the illusions of appetite, and from
the Pauline
and Patristic, interpretation of Christianity. According to him the
function of government is to keep order in a world which is
essentially evil.
Augustine admits both first-order and second-order
volitions (desires), the latter being acts of the liberum voluntatis
arbitrium, the ability to choose between conflicting first-order
volitions

The middle ages

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 The decline of ancient civilization in the West was severe.
Although technology continued to develop, but the
intellectual pursuits, including political philosophy, became
elementary. In the Byzantine Empire, on the other hand,
committees of jurists working for the emperor Justinian (reigned
527–565) produced, defined and condensed Roman law.
The Byzantine basileus, or autocrat (dictator),
had moral responsibility for guarding and harmonizing an
elaborate state, a “colony” of heaven in which reason, and not
mere will, ought to rule.
In the West, two essential principles of Hellenic and
Christian political philosophy were transmitted. In 800 the
Frankish ruler Charlemagne
established a western European empire and called it holy
(blessed) and Roman (classical, ancient). The idea of a Christian
empire coterminous (having the same boundaries) with
civilization thus survived in Western as well as Eastern
Christendom.

JOHN OF SALISBURY
The prince, he insists, is he who rules in accordance with
law, while a tyrant is one who dominates the people by
irresponsible power. This distinction, which derives from the
Greeks, Cicero, and St. Augustine, is fundamental to Western
concepts of liberty and the trusteeship of power.
His favourite metaphor (comparison, symbol) for the body
politic is the human body: the place of the head is filled by the
prince, who is subject only to God; the place of the heart is filled
by the senate (legislature); the eyes, ears, and tongue are the
judges, provincial governors, and soldiers; and the officials are
the hands. The tax gatherers are the intestines and ought not to
retain their collections too long, and the farmers and peasants
are the feet. This vision of a centralized government, more
appropriate to the memory of the Roman Empire than to a

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medieval (primitive, out of date) monarchy, is a landmark of the
12th-century revival of hypothetical thought.
Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas purports to answer all the major questions
of existence, including those of political philosophy. Law is
defined as “that which is a regulation and measure.” It is
designed to promote the “felicity (happiness) and beatitude” that
are the ends of human life. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that
“the city is the perfection of community” and that the purpose of
public power should be to promote the common good. The
only legitimate power is from the community, which is the sole
medium of people’s well-being. He compares society to a ship in
need of a helmsman (steersman, Malah) and repeats Aristotle’s
definition of man as a social and political animal. Again following
Aristotle, he considers oligarchy unjust and democracy evil.
Rulers should aim to make the “life of the multitude good in
accordance with the purpose of life which is heavenly
happiness.” They should also create peace, save life, and
preserve the state—a threefold responsibility.
He asserts that, under God, power resides in the community,
embodied in the ruler but only for so long as the ruler does right.
The society he imagines, however, is medieval, static,
hierarchical, conservative, and based on limited agriculture and
even more limited technology.

Dante
By the early 14th century the great European institutions,
empire and papacy, were breaking down through mutual conflict
and the emergence of national empires. But this conflict gave
rise to the political theory of universal and secular empire
formulated in the medieval West, by the Italian poet and
philosopher Dante Alighieri. Dante insists that only through
universal peace, human abilities can come to their full range. The
aim of civilization is to actualize human potentialities and to

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achieve that “fullness of life which comes from the fulfillment of
our being.”
Monarchy, Dante argues, is necessary as a means to this end.
He was concerned, like Aquinas, to create a political philosophy
with a clear-cut aim and a universal view. In spite of the decline
of the civilization of ancient times in the West, the Greco-Roman
sense of purpose, of the rule of law, and of the responsibility of
power survived in Christian form.

The 16th to the 18th century

Machiavelli

Machiavelli was an experienced diplomat and

administrator, and, he stated flatly how the power struggle was
conducted in Renaissance (revival, rebirth) of Italy. Machiavelli
states that general of men are ungrateful, fickle (indecisive),
false, cowards, greedy, and as long as you succeed they are
yours entirely: they will offer you their blood, property, life, and
children…when the need is far distant; but when it approaches
they turn against you.
And again, since the desires of men are endless, nature
stimuluses them to desire all things and fortune permitting them
to enjoy but few, there results a constant dissatisfaction in their
minds, and a hatred of what they possess.

Machiavelli states that the prince must combine the strength of

the lion with the cunning of the fox: he must always be vigilant,
ruthless, and prompt, striking down or neutralizing his rivals
without warning. And when he does an injury, it must be total.
For “men ought to be either well treated or crushed, because
they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious
ones they cannot.” Moreover, “irresolute (weak, indecisive)

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princes who follow a neutral path are generally ruined.” He
advises that it is best to come down at the right moment on the
winning side and that conquered cities ought to be either
governed directly by the tyrant himself residing there or
destroyed. Furthermore, princes, unlike private men, need not
keep faith: since politics reflects the law of the jungle, the
state is a law unto itself, and normal moral rules do not apply to
it. He considers that the successful ruler has to be
beyond morality, since the safety and expansion of the state are
the supreme objective.

Hobbes
The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who
spent his life as a tutor and companion to great noblemen, was a
writer of genius.

Hobbes states plainly that power creates law, not law

power. For law is law only if it can be enforced, and the price of
security is one supreme sovereign public power. The true law of
nature is self-preservation, he argues, which can be achieved
only if the citizens make a compact among themselves to transfer
their individual power to the “leviathan” (ruler), who alone can
preserve them in security. Such a state has no essential
supernatural moral sanction: it derives its original authority from
the people and can command loyalty only so long as it succeeds
in keeping the peace.
All society is only for gain or glory, and the only true equality
between individuals is their power to kill each other. Hobbes
sees and desires no other equality. Indeed, he specifically
discouraged “men of low degree from a rude behaviour towards
their betters.”
In political philosophy he had gone very deep by providing
the sovereign nation-state with a rational justification and
directing it to utilitarian ends.

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Spinoza
The 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de
Spinoza also tried to make a scientific political theory, but it was
more humane and more modern. Spinoza desired toleration
and intellectual liberty, by which alone human life achieves its
highest quality. Spinoza, was a scientific humanist who justified
political power solely by its usefulness.
In contrast to St. Augustine, he glorifies life and holds that
governments should not try to “change men from rational beings
into beasts or puppets, but enable them to develop their minds
and bodies in security and to employ their reason unchained.”
He is thus a pioneer of a scientific humanist view of government
and of the neutrality of the state in matters of belief.

Richard Hooker’s adapted Thomism

Another influential and politically important strain of
political philosophy emerged from the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. During this
period Protestant and Catholic dogmatists (extremists) criticized
each other and even attacked the authority of princes who, from
interest or conviction, supported one side or the other. Political
assassination became widespread, for both Protestant and
Catholic divines declared that it was legitimate to kill a heretical
(unorthodox) ruler. Appeal was made to rival religious authority
as well as to conscience. In the resulting welter Hobbes and
Spinoza advocated a sovereign state as the remedy.
Richard Hooker, reconciled Thomist doctrines of
natural law, binding on all human beings, with the authority of
the Elizabethan Church of England. Society, he argued, is itself
the fulfillment of natural law, of which human and positive law
are to be adopted. Public power is not something personal, for it
derives from the community under law. Such power can be
derived either directly from God or else from the people. The
prince is responsible to God and the community; he is not, like

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Hobbes’s ruler, a law unto himself. Law makes the king, not the
king law.
Hooker, indeed, insisted that “the prince has a delegated
power, from the Parliament of England, together with
the convocation (of clergy) annexed thereto…whereupon the very
essence of all government doth depend.” This is the power of the
crown in parliament in a balanced constitution, hence an idea of
harmonious government by consent.

LOCKE
It was John Locke, politically the most influential English
philosopher. As a philosopher he accepted strict limitations on
the faculties of the mind, and his political philosophy is moderate
and sensible, aimed at a balance of power between the executive,
the judiciary, and the legislature, though with a bias toward the
last.

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