The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham

I have an enduring fascination with power and how people constitute themselves. With how we organise ourselves successfully enough to build roads, invest lasers and create money. It has always seemed to me that stability is a lucky accident but there are certainly things we can do to extend the incidence of that accident when it comes along.


Having a legal system one can know, access and rely on is, for me, one of the essential instruments to creating islands of stability within which societies can last long enough to build something bigger than their individual parts.


Tom Bingham's book is heartfelt and passionate. It is, perhaps surprisingly, only political where political decisions and the idea of a fair, accessible and equitable legal system is impinged for the sake of personal or political preferences. However that does make it all the more powerful as a book.


Bingham explores not simply the basic concept of what the rule of law actually is but then goes on to examine how it manifests itself across the world but with particular emphasis to Britain and the US. Explorations of Habeus Corpus and knowing that the UK effectively outlawed torture in the 14th Century because it was considered unreliable and cruel even then are exciting and humbling statements for us to consider in light of today's actions by our governments.


Tom Bingham also examines the successes of law, of where it has been a greatly progressive force whilst never losing sight of the fact that laws without context can be absurd and dangerous.


I also learnt that although we have a body of law that could be realistically viewed as a constitution we are not a constitutional democracy. We are a parliamentary democracy - which implies parliament can pass legislation that flouts the rule of law with gusto and never be challenged legitimately by its people. That is one flawed system but better, I think, than a constitutional democracy where the Law is King. Here, with the US as a perfect exemplar, the system fails more seriously because the law cannot help but become politicised and then suffer from capture by the powers that be much more insidiously (because it persists and there is no mechanism for ending such capture).


A superb, short, clear book about an idea we should all be interested in.