Freedom and the Law, Capítulo III, Freedom and the rule of law, de Bruno Leoni

"The supremacy of the law was the chief characteristic cited in Dicey's analysis. He quoted the old law of the English courts: "La ley est la plus haute inheritance, que Ie roi had; car par la ley il meme et toutes ses sujets sont rules, et si la ley ne fuit, nul roi et nul inheritance sera" ("the law is the highest estate to which the king succeeds, for both he and all his subjects are ruled by it, and without it there would be neither king nor realm"). According to Dicey, the supremacy of the law was, in its turn, a principle that corresponded to three other concepts and therefore implied three different and concomitant meanings of the phrase "the rule of law": (1) the absence of arbitrary power on the part of the government to punish citizens or to commit acts against life or property; (2) the subjection of every man, whatever his rank or condition, to the ordinary law of the realm and to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals; and (3) a predominance of the legal spirit in English institutions, because of which, as Dicey explains, "the general principles of the English constitution (as, for example, the right to personal liberty or the right to public assembly) are the result of judicial decisions .... ; whereas under many foreign constitutions the security given to the rights of individuals results or appears to result from the general (abstract) principles of the constitution." *

Americans may wonder whether or not Dicey the American system in the same class as the Continental systems Europe. Americans derive or appear to derive their individual rights from the general principles laid down in their Constitution and in the first ten amendments. As a matter of fact, Dicey considered the United States a typical instance of a country living under "the rule of law" because she had inherited the English traditions. He was right, as one sees when one recalls, on the one hand, the fact that a written bill of rights was not considered necessary at first by the Founding Fathers-who did not even include it in the text of the Constitution itself-and, on the other hand, the importance that judicial decisions on the part of ordinary tribunals had and still have in the political system of the United States as far as the rights of individuals are concerned."

E este sentido de rule of law, de acordo com Leoni, está sendo perdido. O capítulo inteiro é excelente! O livro é muito bom [ e olhem o que achei: EM PORTUGUêS! ]

*[Leoni extraiu as informações daqui:] Albert Venn Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th ed.; London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 191.