Ken Schoolland – The Rule of Law

The only way that a law is valid is when it is in support of individual rights. A lot of people think that you've got to obey the law. The law is the law. And if you don't like it, you should change it. Law can be really bad law, and you shouldn't have to obey immoral bad law.

Albert Venn Dicey is the British jurist who popularized the notion of the rule of law. And he said there were three principles behind the rule of law. One, it had been written down and applied consistently for everybody. Two, it couldn't hold some people superior to the law. In other words, the king had to obey the law as well as everybody else. But the third and most important principle of the rule of law, he said was that it had to uphold the individual rights. It couldn't be a violation of individual rights, because then it was improper and immoral law.

Well, you can look at this in so many ways. A slave who ran away from his master. Well even if it was illegal. It wasn't right for the slave to be returned to his master. Even though it was illegal for a Jewish immigrant to flee from the Hitler's Germany during World War Two and to break the immigration laws coming here, it wasn't immoral. It was the moral thing for them to do and the law was a violation of their individual rights. And it wasn't right for Rosa Parks to be mandated by law to sit in the back of the bus. She had every right to sit in the front of the bus, and she didn't have to wait to the law to change for her to make a moral act. You could also say that today it isn't right for somebody to be put in jail because they smoked marijuana. The law is wrong.

It is always important to decide when the law is in support of individual rights and therefore a just law. And when it's in violation of individual rights, it's an unjust and immoral law. And thus the only way that a law is valid is when it is in support of individual rights. That's what Albert Venn Dicey meant by the rule of law.

Source: SCHOOLLAND YouTube channel.