What is the Rule of Law, Anyway?
About the author: Sean Gallagher ’21 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the World Justice Project. He is currently an International Relations major at Stanford University.
Every so often, I read a book or listen to a podcast that burrows itself into my brain in a way that makes me begin to see it everywhere, and it becomes a voice in the back of my head and changes the way that I see the world (if only for a few days). It happened last summer when I was with a group of Stanford human rights students in Bogotá and happened to be reading a biography of Simón Bolívar by Marie Arana. I began to notice that there were portraits of him everywhere: every politician from every end of the spectrum and every government office seemed to have an ornately framed portrait of the gaunt, wild-haired revolutionary that stared at me everywhere I went.
This past summer, then, as I interned at the World Justice Project and spent every day studying rule of law issues around the world, the particular ways that the rule of law is talked about in the United States stood out to me as somewhat strange. For fun, I tried a little experiment — if you google any major US politician and the phrase “rule of law”, you are probably going to find a quote where they claim to support it. Much like Simón Bolívar, everyone seems to worship the rule of law — but everyone seems to interpret the rule of law to suit their own interests. The WJP has eight factors (including open government, fundamental rights, and order and security) that it uses to measure the rule of law across over 140 countries in order to encourage stakeholders to strengthen and uphold it.
For all the amazing work that the WJP does, though, I still prefer the definition that US Citizenship and Immigration Services uses for the Naturalization Test to define the rule of law. It conveys an important message: that these principles are something that every American must know and value to be a good citizen. The definition of the rule of law that every new American must learn has four simple elements: everyone must follow the law, leaders must obey the law, government must obey the law, and no one is above the law.
We have seen almost every facet of this definition violated in the United States over the past four years. The current government erodes the rule of law on a daily basis: the Republican National Convention was one long violation of the idea that our leaders have to obey the law as they integrated government functions into a presidential campaign event. President Trump’s Chief of Staff openly stated that “nobody outside the Beltway cares” about the Hatch Act, which was designed to separate political campaigns from political office and ensure that the American president governed on behalf of all Americans. Furthermore, blatant corruption and nepotism regarding the Trump family and its business have plagued the United States for the past four years, as the official stance of the executive branch became that the President is above the law while in office. Finally, some laws are seemingly less important to the Trump administration than others: the President recently called on his supporters to vote twice, all the while claiming to combat electoral fraud. I could go on and on — about how the United States shouldn’t be afraid of accountability through the International Criminal Court, how senate confirmation of cabinet members is a constitutional obligation, how the CDC shouldn’t make decisions about the health of the country based on the President’s electoral strategy.
There is one bright spot, though. Unlike Simón Bolívar, who is long dead and unable to define his own legacy, we can work to defend and define the rule of law. That is something that I learned at the WJP: by measuring the rule of law, we can see where we are deficient and work to fix it. The rule of law matters exactly as much as we value it: if we hold ourselves and our leaders to a high standard, it matters.
