Law is not the only way to try and control behavior. Psychological manipulation, brute force, and managerial direction are other alternatives. The complaints about law and lawyers are familiar. If you engage in legal processes, they can be slow, inefficient, complicated to navigate, expensive; and, in their process or in their outcomes, unjust. In the face of these complaints and the fact that we have alternatives to governance by law, why should rule by law shape some of the standards by which we evaluate the legitimacy of governments?
To be able to answer that question, we have to first understand what law is. The starting point for my response is a very simple and very thin understanding articulated by a scholar upon whose work I draw upon frequently: Lon Fuller. According to Fuller, law is “the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.” A set of conditions need to be met in order for that to be possible. Rules have to take a certain form. We can’t govern our conduct on the basis of rules that are kept secret, so promulgation is needed. Neither can rules be contradictory, such that so we don’t know what to do, so rules must be consistent. Nor can rules tell me today what I needed to do yesterday, so rules must be prospective rather than retrospective.
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