Sevel on The Rule of Law: A Thought Pattern @michaelsevel.bsky.social

Michael Sevel, The University of Sydney Faculty of Law, is publishing The Rule of Law: A Thought Pattern in The Rule of Law in Ancient Rome (Eleanor Cowan, Kit Morrell, Andrew Pettinger, and Michael Sevel, eds., Oxford University Press, eds, 2025). Here is the abstract.

The interdisciplinary revival in rule of law studies over the last quarter century has produced an impressive diversity of views about the ideal's content, priority, and value. That diversity has sometimes encouraged the skeptical view that it has no conceptual core or nature, and is either 'essentially contested' or else only empty political rhetoric. I argue that amongst the various views about the rule of law developed over the centuries, there is a discernible, recurring thought pattern upon which the many variations have been proliferated. Whatever else it is, the rule of law is realized when a political community has an efficacious legal system with certain enabling and pervasive characteristics, which protects its members from something presumed in that community to be undesirable, often identified as the arbitrary exercise of power. I explain and illustrate each aspect of this pattern, and draw a few lessons about how it guides, or fails to guide, current rule-of-law debates.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.