The Gateway Chronicle 2020

56 Power
The Rule of Law and
Democracy
D
emocracy is a word that’s commonly
used with little appreciation
of the important components
behind it. Furthermore, due to its existence
being mostly “behind the scenes”,
the significance of the rule of law is often
overlooked, too. However, the rule of law
is, of course, a fundamental principle of
every true democracy. Despite the continuing
fight to preserve this principle, the
ideas surrounding it stem from classical
thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero. After
the classical empires ended, it was individual
events such as the signing of
Magna Carta that were the next significant
points on the realisation of the rule of law,
followed by a cocktail of influential earlymodern
thinkers and revolutions in England,
America, and France, that finally
fused democracy and the rule of law.
Simply put, the rule of law is the principle
that nobody is above the law, even those
in a position of power. The laws must be
comprehensible and easy to obey, and justice
must be administered fairly and
openly. This tripartite definition was conceived
by A.V Dicey, without whom the
term ‘rule of
law’ would not
have been popularised.
Nonetheless,
most of
the strands can
be drawn from
various different
parts of history across the world, and
it is this muddled formation which is important
to explore to see how the concept
of the rule of law was conceived, and how
inextricably linked it is with democracy.
To start, it’s interesting to see how the
ideas of the rule of law can easily be
“nobody is above the
law, even those in a
position of power”
An example of a court in the Dikasteria system
traced
back to the classical world: Aristotle held
the importance of good laws over that of
good rulers. In fact, in his work Politics,
Aristotle asserts that laws ought to be supreme
over everything, showing his emphasis
of that key legal principle, which
also ensures key democratic principles –
such as accountability and legitimacy –
can be upheld. Additionally, Cicero (born
around 200 years after Aristotle died) devised
the idea of Natural Law: basic, instinctive
laws similar to the human rights
we have today. Moreover, they were
both constitutionalists; the importance
of a constitution for democracy again
being that it ensures legitimacy and accountability
of the government, further
demonstrating how the rule of law was
already inseparable from democratic
principles. The significance of these
ideas is shown through their assimilation
into greater things, and also through the
fact that they were drawn up in some of
the most politically advanced states in history.