Brian Tamanaha’s On the Rule of Law

My next post will concern some issues of accountability and the rule of law, but I wanted to point out to anyone who may be interested that Cambridge University Press has just published a book entitled On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory by my colleague here at St. John’s Law, Brian Tamanaha. Many lawyers, especially legal philosophers and international lawyers, talk and write alot about the rule of law without necessarily considering whether the concept is one that has stayed constant or even whether it currently has different meanings for domestic legal systems and international law. Anyway, Tamanaha discusses these issues, going through a history of the concept of the rule of law from Roman times forward and also considers current debates on the rule of law in international law and as a “universal” value. I’ll come back to this topic momentarily…