[vinceguidry]

"Invention" is somewhat arbitrary when discussing topics as these. You have to draw a line somewhere, and the English were the first to actually subjugate the head of state to their system of laws. Therefore I say the English invented rule of law. They may not have been the first to think that the king needs to follow the law, but they were the first to successfully demand it. Obviously you can look back through history and find isolated examples of things that kind-of look like rule of law, but the English were the first to do it right.

A fun thing to do is to go through different countries you're interested in and analyze how much of the rule of law each of them actually implements, rather than just professes to have. Laws and justice are such appealing notions that even tyrants feel the need to put the people they want to execute on "trial". Plenty of totalitarian governments have nominal "constitutions" that aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

I personally consider it a measure of how advanced and robust a society is. One should not think of democracy as "people having elections", but rather as a collection of different principles which society forces the people that would want to rule it to follow. Is there a functioning legal system? Is there a system for transfer of power? Is there a working constitution? The rule of law is an emergent property that rests on all of these things.

[dragonwriter]

> You have to draw a line somewhere, and the English were the first to actually subjugate the head of state to their system of laws.

I can't think of any reasonable standard where England actually has subjugated the head of state to their laws and is also the first to have done so by that standard.

I mean, surely we aren't holding up the military purge of Parliament that produced the Rump Parliament and that Rump Parliament's creation of the "High Court of Justice" and its prosecution of the King as an example of the rule of law... At best, that would give the English credit for the creation of the revolutionary kangaroo court (and, even at that, it probably wasn't original.)

And, even if you were to credit that as establishing the rule of law (and certainly, a lot of the language popularly used -- e.g., in the US's own revolution -- about the relationship between the monarch and the law stems from that prosecution and the propaganda around it), you'd have to recognize that that was hardly a durable principle established in England, having been somewhat forcibly repudiated when everyone who participated it that was caught by the post-Restoration government having been executed for their participation in it.

[vinceguidry]

> you'd have to recognize that that was hardly a durable principle established in England, having been somewhat forcibly repudiated when everyone who participated it that was caught by the post-Restoration government having been executed for their participation in it.

It was tenuous when it was first established. It became less so over time. Nothing happens all at once. If the North Koreans suddenly decided they wanted to ape the rule of law and passed a whole bunch of laws and killed a bunch of people French Revolution style, I would hesitate to say that the new nation has rule of law for at least a hundred years, unless I lived there and could observe the process directly so I could ascertain whether they're moving overall towards robust rule of law or more towards modern Russian oligarchy.

[dragonwriter]

> It was tenuous when it was first established. It became less so over time.

From the Restoration to now the complete immunity of the monarch to civil and criminal law has been given; and its only in the mid-20th century that British law recognized some claims against the monarch's government being of-right rather than by-license.

The idea of the monarch being subject to the law was more of a momentary, fleeting, and swiftly violently repressed concept in English law that had already been generally repudiated in England itself when the idea got raised as part of the Revolutionary propaganda in some of England's American colonies a century later, rather than something that was tenuous when first proposed in England but which later became firmly established.

(To the extent Britain has made progress in the rule of law, accountability of the chief of state to the law is pretty much the worst place to look for examples; the bloodshed on both sides of that issue has led to most subsequent progress in the direction of rule of law focusing on making the monarch irrelevant to the law in anything other than a symbolic sense rather than accountable to it.)

[vinceguidry]

It was fairly obvious once I started studying this stuff that the idea that a head of state should be immune to certain laws that keep commoners in line. It would suck if the President had to wait in line at airport security. You don't prosecute the President, you impeach him. The class of wrongs he can commit is wholly different than that of his people by virtue of his position. Note I never said that a sovereign and his people need to be under the same law. That doesn't really work. What's important is that his powers are limited and circumscribed to a select few, with all others devolving to the people.

Many, many important battles have been fought to change the nature of power between state and nation to form a real difference from the normal state of affairs. That is what I'm arguing is the real crux of the matter.