Rule of law

In England, even in 1800, the members of trade unions might be liable to punishment under the Combination Act of 1800, or under the law of conspiracy, and a trade union which was certainly a non-lawful, was possibly an unlawful society, but it could not be dissolved at the will of the Government.

But I have come trusting first in the gods, then in the laws and in you, believing that with you no scheming preparation can override law and justice.

When, therefore, fellow citizens, what the lawgiver names offices, they call employments and commissions, it is your duty to remember the law, and to set it against their shamelessness, and to remind them that you refuse to accept a rascally sophist, who expects to destroy the laws with phrases;

Another law forbids crowning an official before he has rendered his accounts, and you have sworn to vote according to the laws;

If men are to be happy, the voice of law, and not a ruler’s threats, must reign supreme;

For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base;

I consider that the kind of art which can implant honesty and justice in depraved natures has never existed and does not now exist, and that people who profess that power will grow weary and cease from their vain pretensions before such an education is ever found.

but, because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts;

Magna Carta has thus been truly said to enunciate “the reign of law” or “rule of law” in the phrase made famous by Professor Dicey.