A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law

AuthorAlani Golanski
PositionLL.M., James Kent Scholar, Columbia University School of Law; M.A. Philosophy, Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Director, Weitz & Luxenberg, P.C., New York, New York
Pages119-153

Alani Golanski*

The prevalent approach to the concept of the rule of law among legal theorists puts
attributes rst, assigning certain features of laws and sometimes legal systems as
rule-of-law virtues. Inquiring at a more basic level, this paper advances a novel,
structuralist view of the rule of law. While honoring theoretical constraints that guard
against diluting the rule-of-law concept too thinly as a remedy for myriad societal ills,
this approach shows that the concept implicates inequalities sustained by a society’s
social, economic, and political structures. This is accomplished by demonstrating
that the rule-of-law project holds a structural position in the collective normative
discourse as a vehicle by which people morally evaluate the interplay between the
actual capabilities of individuals and groups to participate in law, and the legal
system’s treatment of those individuals and groups.
Law’s procedural outputs may formally provide the public with access to the
legal system, but the rule-of-law project goes to the actual capabilities of the people
to access the system in reality, to have a fair opportunity to participate in the inputs
into the system, and to have that participation impartially adjudicated. Conditions
impacting a diversity of stakeholders – and particularly the most disadvantaged
within the population – perturb the virtues typically associated with the rule-of-
law ideal when those conditions, and the power exercised to maintain them, impair
capabilities for fair, dignied, and equal access to legal processes.
Understanding the rule of law in structuralist terms, as an informal moral
operator, (1) makes sense of the schism we normally accept between the concepts
of law and the rule of law, (2) reorients the source of rule-of-law thinking from
theorists bent on xing a conceptual denition to communities engaged in rst-order
interactions with the legal system, (3) helps explain why citizens come not only to
expect law to constrain ocial coercive powers but also to demand that law promote
their actual capabilities to participate in the legal system on an egalitarian and
dignitarian footing, and hence (4) implicates a critique of conditions of political and
material inequalities that cannot but impair the healthy functioning of the rule-of-law
project.

The Rule of Law; Jurisprudence; Legal Theory; Waldron; Dworkin; Plato;
Aristotle; Dicey; Raz; Rousseau; Amartya Sen

© 2021 Alani Golanski, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
*          
         

  
   
 

10 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2021)
 ........................................................................................
 .....................
 .........................................
 
 ..............................................................................................
 ............................................................................................

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A Structuralist Concept of the Rule of Law


  

 Elsewhere


   
      
  


 


         
        





   
        
  What’s the Point of the Rule of Law?    

 See generally  


 See   Dictatorship and the Rule of Law: Rules and Military Power in
Pinochet’s Chile, in

  
Are States of Emergency Inside or Outside the Legal Order
    
 
     Lineages of the
Rule of Law, in 

cf.


 See The Rule of Law, in 
            
 

 the rule of law
   

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