The Rule of Law in the United States of America

Extract

Introduction

The rule of law has been a fundamental value in the legal, historical, and normative order of the United States of America since the birth of the Republic, and remains so today. Yet the rule of law has also been under threat from the beginning and will never be fully secure. An unachievable ideal, the rule of law sets the standard against which Americans measure the progress of their law and government. The Revolution, the Constitution, and the legal institutions of the United States all seek “the empire of laws and not of men.”¹ Despite its mixed success, this search has been and remains the unifying thread in the history of American law.²

This commitment to the rule of law was most prominently and directly made in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which promises that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”³ The Fourteenth Amendment added that “No State shall. . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”⁴ Similar guarantees already existed in the constitutions of each of the separate States of the Union.⁵ The Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780) put this shared commitment simply and clearly when it embraced the universal right to enjoy “a government of laws and not of men.”⁶