Quotes About Rule of law

While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.

Societies seek to enforce basic social rules universally, but a rule of law that protects citizens against arbitrary actions of the state itself is often initially applied only to a minority of privileged subjects. The law, in other words, protects the interests of the elites who are close to the state or who control the state, and in that sense law resembles what Socrates in Plato's Republic labels the "justice of a band of robbers.

The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust.

However, neither rule of law nor political accountability exists in contemporary China any more than they did in dynastic China.

The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government.

Americans can be proud of this very substantive identity; it is based on belief in the common political principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the principle that "all men are created equal" (now interpreted to include all women). These political ideas come directly out of the Enlightenment and are the only possible basis for unifying a modern liberal democracy that has become de facto multicultural

In the hands of good leaders, such a system can actually perform better than a democratic system that is subject to rule of law and formal democratic procedures like multiparty elections. It can make large, difficult decisions without being hampered by interest groups, lobbying, litigation, or the need to form cumbersome political coalitions or educate the public as to their own self-interest.

a politically developed liberal democracy includes all three sets of institutions—the state, rule of law, and procedural accountability—

Germany, in other words, developed both a strong state and rule of law early on, well before it developed accountable government.

Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature of the absolutism that was achieved in pre-Bolshevik Russia was qualitatively different from that of either old regime France or Spain, and much closer to the premodern Chinese or Ottoman variants.

China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign.

We respect the will of our citizens, whether they are Kurds or Arabs or Turkmen, but will not allow an illegal and unconstitutional procedure done under the threat of weapons to yield results.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

The magic of the American experience is that we've upheld the rule of law for everybody, everybody treated equally beneath the law.

I think one of the brilliant parts of our democracy is how resilient it is. We are each allowed to have our own beliefs and, as long as we follow the rule of law, we can express them however we'd like. This is a unique characteristic of the best democracies and one I value tremendously.

The state can be a force for good. The Rule of law is absolutely essential to a good life. God has instituted government and leaders throughout history and throughout the Biblical narrative. However, the state is growing precisely as the church is fading as a force for good, and this does not seem to be a good trend.

Sentencing a political opponent to death after a show trial is no different to taking him out on the street and shooting him. In fact, it is worse because using the court system as a tool of state repression makes a mockery of the rule of law.

When words lose their meaning and their capacity to bind those who use them, neither democracy nor the rule of law can long survive.

Allowing illegal immigrants that are gang members and criminals with COVID to enter the U.S. and receive citizenship is a slap in the face to the American people and the rule of law.

The Chinese have certain advantages. The fact that it's a single party government. But I do believe in the long run the fact that India is a functioning democracy committed to the rule of law. Our system is slow to move but I'm confident that once decisions are taken they are going to be far more durable.

Were I confirmed as a judge, I would decide cases according to the rule of law beginning to end.

In a nation based on the 'consent of the governed,' judges are supposed to apply the laws the people have assented to.

Independent judges have always frustrated governments that don't see why unelected arbiters of the law should stand in their way.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.