A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law |

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No. 10-1, April 2021

British Journal of American Legal Studies

A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law

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

Alani Golanski*



The prevalent approach to the concept of the rule of law among legal theorists puts

attributes rst, assigning certain features of laws and sometimes legal systems as

rule-of-law virtues. Inquiring at a more basic level, this paper advances a novel,

structuralist view of the rule of law. While honoring theoretical constraints that guard

against diluting the rule-of-law concept too thinly as a remedy for myriad societal ills,

this approach shows that the concept implicates inequalities sustained by a society’s

social, economic, and political structures. This is accomplished by demonstrating

that the rule-of-law project holds a structural position in the collective normative

discourse as a vehicle by which people morally evaluate the interplay between the

actual capabilities of individuals and groups to participate in law, and the legal

system’s treatment of those individuals and groups.

Law’s procedural outputs may formally provide the public with access to the

legal system, but the rule-of-law project goes to the actual capabilities of the people

to access the system in reality, to have a fair opportunity to participate in the inputs

into the system, and to have that participation impartially adjudicated. Conditions

impacting a diversity of stakeholders – and particularly the most disadvantaged

within the population – perturb the virtues typically associated with the rule-of-

law ideal when those conditions, and the power exercised to maintain them, impair

capabilities for fair, dignied, and equal access to legal processes.

Understanding the rule of law in structuralist terms, as an informal moral

operator, (1) makes sense of the schism we normally accept between the concepts

of law and the rule of law, (2) reorients the source of rule-of-law thinking from

theorists bent on xing a conceptual denition to communities engaged in rst-order

interactions with the legal system, (3) helps explain why citizens come not only to

expect law to constrain ocial coercive powers but also to demand that law promote

their actual capabilities to participate in the legal system on an egalitarian and

dignitarian footing, and hence (4) implicates a critique of conditions of political and

material inequalities that cannot but impair the healthy functioning of the rule-of-law

project.



The Rule of Law; Jurisprudence; Legal Theory; Waldron; Dworkin; Plato;

Aristotle; Dicey; Raz; Rousseau; Amartya Sen



This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

*          

         



  

   

 



10 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2021)

 ........................................................................................

 .....................

 .........................................

 

 ..............................................................................................

 ............................................................................................



120

A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law





  



 Elsewhere





   

      

  





 





         

        











   

        

  What’s the Point of the Rule of Law?    



 See generally  





 See   Dictatorship and the Rule of Law: Rules and Military Power in

Pinochet’s Chile, in



  

Are States of Emergency Inside or Outside the Legal Order

    

 

     Lineages of the

Rule of Law, in 



cf.





 See The Rule of Law, in 

            

 



 the rule of law

   



121

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A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law

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