Abstract

The idea of the Rule of Law is essential to the philosophical foundation of liberal political thought. Scholars drawing upon the tenets of Marxism and Legal Realism have long argued that it is a delusory doctrine, one which contributes to the inegalitarian nature of liberalism and masks the undemocratic exercise of judicial power. ;In recent years, the Critical Legal Studies movement has become prominent for its radical critique of liberal legal thought and the Rule of Law. The CLS movement seems to have successfully synthesized the older arguments into a powerful and potentially devastating third wave of criticism, intended to debunk "the myth of the Rule of Law" and finally sweep away the crumbling edifice of liberalism. ;The Rule of Law appears to rest on a distinction between law and politics, and hence between legal and political reasoning. The CLS critique focuses on this distinction, arguing that if law is politics, the Rule of Law cannot be distinguished from political rule. ;A. V. Dicey's Law of the Constitution was the source of the twentieth-century's most influential account of the Rule of Law. Examining Dicey's political and legal thought, it is abundantly clear that Dicey was not a dogmatic legal formalist. He believed that law was inevitably political, and that the relation between law and politics must be mediated by the liberal ideal of judicial statesmanship