Release Date:
May 19, 2026

What Is the Rule of Law and Why Have Free People Fought for It for Over Eight Hundred Years?

You hear the phrase the “Rule of Law” often these days, but many Americans would have a tough time saying what it means or why it matters. To answer these questions, you have to go back to medieval England when the idea that kings had to be subject to the rule of law first appeared.

Picture yourself an English nobleman in the year 1215. You think you have it made with a title, a castle, and serfs to work your vast landholdings but the problem is your king believes he has the God given right to do whatever he wants and he wants to wage wars in foreign lands. To pay for his wars he keeps losing he keeps jacking up your taxes and uses his royal courts to arbitrarily impose large fines, seize and forfeit property and titles, and punish anybody who opposes him.

So, to keep from losing everything, you join with other desperate nobleman and threaten to storm the king’s Winsor Castle unless he signs a document we now call the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215, in a nearby field called Runnymede to end the rebellion. The most revolutionary ideas contained in the document, not yet a law itself, is that the king would thereafter be bound by the document and no free man could be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, … except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

Don’t get too excited, before the ink was dry on the Magna Carta, the king repudiated it and, for good measure, had his friend the Pope annul it too, but the idea the king was subject to the law endured. It only took to another couple of rebellions, a couple of new kings, and eighty-two years before those principles actually became part of the English law in 1297 but, if you think that resolved the question, you’d be wrong again by another four hundred years.

You see, kings never much liked the idea that their powers were limited by anything, never mind pesky laws, and continued to impose taxes without parliamentary approval, imprison critics, and claim sweeping powers by divine right. The English parliament responded to those kingly abuses by enacting even stronger laws which the kings continued to ignore. This led to another rebellion in 1649 ending with the execution of the king and it wasn’t until 1688 when the restoration of the monarchy following what is called the Glorius Revolution that parliament passed the English Bill of Rights firmly establishing the government based on constitutional law.

The political enlightenment of the seventeenth century expanded the Rule of Law to include the truly revolutionary idea we could do away with kings altogether with the idea legitimate government derived from the consent of the people. Who’d have thought the same grievances against the arbitrary abuse of kingly power would lead to the American Revolution a mere eighty-eight years later in 1776.

As we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday this year, we would do well to remember free people have resisted the abuses of arbitrary power for over eight centuries. It has survived rebellions and civil wars to become one of the founding principles of the United States Constitution and our treasured Bill of Rights. Efforts today to expand the executive powers of the president at the expense of the legislature’s power to pass laws and the courts powers to apply them fairly and equally to all persons runs contrary to the Rule of Law our ancestors fought and died for. We lawyers have taken a solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of this State and of the United States and that is why we have formed the South Carolina Lawyers for the Protection of the Rule of Law to join with other lawyers from across our State and nation to protect the Rule of Law in these troubling times.

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