Rule of Law

"Rule of Law" is a foundational constitutional principle that says a country should be governed by law, and by law alone — not by the arbitrary will or wide personal discretion of the persons in power. The concept was most famously developed by the British jurist A. V. Dicey, who identified three core principles.

1. Supremacy of law. No person, however high their office, is above the law. The government itself, and every official acting on its behalf, must act strictly within the powers the law gives them — arbitrary, unchecked power has no place in a system governed by the Rule of Law. This is the direct opposite of a system based on wide, unreviewable discretionary authority.

2. Equality before the law. Every person, rich or poor, ordinary citizen or government official, is subject to the same law and is tried in the same ordinary courts. No one gets special legal immunity purely because of their rank, wealth, or position (though the Constitution can, and does, carve out specific, reasoned exceptions — e.g. certain immunities for the President or Governors while in office — these are themselves rules OF law, not exceptions to the idea of law altogether).

3. Predominance of the legal spirit — rights secured through the ordinary law of the land. In Dicey's original English formulation, individual rights (personal liberty, freedom of speech, and so on) flow from and are protected by the decisions of ordinary courts applying the ordinary law, rather than existing only on paper in a written constitutional document with no real judicial machinery behind them. (India's own constitutional system layers a written Constitution — with Fundamental Rights and judicial review — on top of this idea, but the underlying spirit, that rights must be real and court-enforceable rather than merely declared, is exactly what Dicey was getting at.) …