Conclusion: a commitment to equality begins at home

Paul Gowder

doi:10.1017/CBO9781316480182.011

To build a legal system that is regular, public, and general is to set the state on a course in which its overwhelming power is to be used against the people in the community only when those who wield it can explain, to the satisfaction of a watchful public, how its use is consistent with the equal standing of those against whom it is to be used. To establish such a system is to declare a commitment to equality; to maintain it is to rely on that commitment across the political community. That, in two sentences, has been the argument of this book.The promotion and maintenance of the rule of law is an urgent human rights problem. There are countless people living and dying in terror at the hands of thugs in uniforms, and more who are doomed to social, economic, and political inferiority and misery by unjust and hierarchical legal systems. I do not expect that this small book can contribute much to resolve these problems. If it helps at all, it may only be by offering a language in which we can discuss the rule of law without focusing on the self-absorbed economic and political interests of the wealthy and powerful. The rule of law is a way of respecting the equal moral worth of all humans; we ought to say so, and work to build this equality across the world.Contemporary rule of law talk often sounds like those who seek to promote the law in the developing world placidly assume that it's being exported from countries in the developed world that have successfully held on to the value. But critics within the developed world have called this into question. For example, many have argued that the war on terror has undermined the commitment of the United States and other Western democracies to rule of law values in favor of regimes of so-called enhanced interrogation, secret and procedurally bare military trials, extrajudicial assassinations, torture, and the like.Nor may we be complacent about maintaining the rule of law in the Western democracies to the extent it does exist. One important implication of the strategic analysis in Chapter 6 is that the rule of law is sensitive to shifts in political, economic, and military power.

Conclusion: a commitment to equality begins at home

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