In May 2015, the British PM David Cameron famously said

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.

He followed this up with the admonition than the government must "bring the country together" by "actively promoting certain values. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality." Note that nationality and religion are conspicuously absent from that list.

Alarming as the Cameron soundbite is, there is of course precedent from the other side of the pond. Bingham quotes David Cole from 2003:

With a stroke of the pen, in other words, President Bush denied foreign nationals basic rights of political association, political speech, due process, and privacy.

How does the removal of due process and the presumption of innocence for foreigners square with the Rule of Law?

Bingham struggles with that question after outlining the history of the Rule of Law and providing a modern definition for what we expect a country abiding by the Rule of Law to respect. It's clear that this definition is based on Western European values of tolerance and individual independence, which unfortunately are at odds with each other in any concentrated population.

And that is fine, Bingham seems to say, as long as the government abides by the laws and principles which it has set forth, no matter what the consequences.

One of the most dangerous temptations for a government facing violent threats is to respond in heavy-handed ways that violate the rights of innocent citizens. Terrorism is a criminal act and should be treated accordingly -- and that means applying the law fairly and consistently.

That was Madeleine Albright, also quoted by Bingham, from April 2000. Remember 2000? Before the US collectively crapped itself at the realization that not everybody liked them, and decided that because Americans were such swell people after all, everybody else must obviously be wrong, and therefore they deserve what they get.

And who could have forseen this reaction? It seems pretty obvious in retrospect:

After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along.

That was William Brennan, again quoted by Bingham, writing in 1987 and referring to such past embarrassments as the interment of Japanese-Americans and the McCarthy red scare.

But politicians are no students of history. No surprise there -- they can't handle basic maths either.

So while it's tempting to say that every elected and appointed official should read this book of Bingham's, it wouldn't make one bit of difference. A politician has the memory of a goldfish, and the attention span of a teenager.

Which means it is up to everyone else to read this excellent book, and to hold those self-aggrandizing bastards responsible for the wrongs they have wrought. ( )

In this little book, evidently written to appeal to general readers as well as lawyers (another reviewer here puts it very well: "the most wonderfully simple, jargon-free, crystal-clear prose that could be understood by any smart twelve-year-old"), Bingham takes us through the history of the concept — from Magna Carta and habeas corpus to the international conventions of the 20th century — and why it is important, and then looks in a little more detail at the most important implications the rule of law has in practice, in the requirements it sets for the law to be clear and accessible, in the restrictions it puts on arbitrary acts by representatives of the state, in the requirement of fairness, transparency and impartiality in court procedure, in the necessity of a proper system of legal protection for human rights, and in international law.

He also looks at how the rule of law has repeatedly been threatened by governments over-reacting to perceived emergencies, in particular to the various excesses of the Bush and Blair governments in the response to 9/11 — where he has, rather grudgingly, to admit that the British were at least less evil than the Americans in their draconian curtailments of human rights. He doesn't say so, but of course we know that was partly due to the fact that Blair had a Lord Bingham breathing down his neck...

It's interesting to see that he anticipates disputes between government and judiciary over judicial review as a future point of contention in Britain, and he criticises the British public for its acquiescence in the rapid growth of the surveillance society. Had he had the chance to write a second edition, he'd have had quite a bit to add on both of those.

A very clear, concise, and penetrating account of what law is for and how it works in a modern society: obviously it should be required reading for anyone going into either politics or the legal profession. My only minor disappointment was that Bingham didn't think of ending the book by quoting the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe — "...and I, my lords, embody the law". If anyone was ever entitled to use that exit line, he was! ( )

Buen libro sobre el imperio del derecho (rule of law) la primera parte muy buena la segunda muy circunscripta a los problemas alrededor de la guerra contra el terrorismo y para los que estamos lejos de eso tal vez aburrida por lo detallista. Muy bueno el ultimo capítulo sobre la supremacía de la reina en el parlamento, y la explicación de porque no es posible la declaración de inconstitucionalidad en el sistema inglés

Very interesting and incredibly well written. Well worth owning and rereading. ( )

One of the things I liked about Britain's being in the EU was having an extra layer of legal appeal that lay above the level of the nation-state. This is of course exactly what many anti-Europe campaigners hate most, but from my experience of Europe these myriad rulings about flammable duvets and transporting hazardous substances, all hashed out quietly by experts far away from the media pressure of any particular country, were generally sensible and politically unpartisan.

When (dare I say if) the UK does leave Europe, all of that legislation will disappear and some army of bureaucrats will have to recreate most of it again under British law. Fortunately we will, at least as far as I can tell, still be signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, whose court in Strasbourg has already helped several Brits whose rights were not satisfactorily upheld by British rulings. The fact that EU member-states are required to sign this convention is one of the many reasons the Union has been such a force for good, as can be seen from the many former Eastern Bloc countries that bent over backwards to commit to ‘the rule of law and respect for human rights’ in order to join.

That phrase ‘the rule of law’, written into the EU's Copenhagen criteria, is a cliché that covers a lot of ground, and this small, lucid book is an attempt to set down what exactly it means to most people and why it matters. Lord Bingham was, until his death in 2010, the most senior as well as the most eminent judge in Britain, and before that was typically described as the greatest lawyer of his generation. Like only the true masters in any field, he distils the complexities of his subject into the most wonderfully simple, jargon-free, crystal-clear prose that could be understood by any smart twelve-year-old.

Particularly useful is the brief run-down of key historical landmarks in establishing the principles of western law, from Magna Carta in 1215, through Bills of Rights both British (1689) and American (1791), down to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Progress has been slow and incremental and sometimes rather two-steps-forward-one-step-back. It wasn't, for instance, until 1836 that defence counsel was allowed to address the jury directly on the defendant's behalf – in fact one judge in his memoirs recalls a conviction of theft that took place after a trial lasting all of two minutes fifty-three seconds, including the economical jury direction: ‘Gentlemen, I suppose you have no doubt? I have none.’

The historical context proves to be quite illuminating when it comes to contemporary debates. In the seventeenth century, for instance, Charles II's chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon, had a habit of transferring political prisoners to outlying parts of the United Kingdom where the writ of habeas corpus did not run, and where he could therefore hold people indefinitely. After his fall from power, it was felt that this practice should somehow be prevented, and the result was the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act 1679 – an Act which only just got through the House of Lords, by the way, supposedly because the person counting the ayes ‘succeeded, without his opposite number noticing, in counting a very fat Lord as 10’.

Bingham uses this story to discuss Guantánamo Bay, a facility set up to do exactly what the Earl of Clarendon did and for the same reasons, and which has seen the same tussle between the executive and the judiciary in the US that Britain went through in the 1600s. Bingham is, indeed, quite worried about roll-backs in people's legal rights, particularly following President Bush's declaration of a War on Terror (this book was written as Obama was being elected). He stresses, for instance, the vital importance that national laws should protect non-nationals (a matter of ‘equality before the law’); this is not just for their own sake, but also because curtailing the rights of non-nationals has so often been the prelude to denying the same rights to citizens.

This is very much a live issue. The USA PATRIOT Act, for example, denied foreigners basic rights of political association, due process and privacy; in the UK, meanwhile, new legislation after 9/11 meant that foreigners suspected of terrorism could be held indefinitely but British nationals accused of the same thing could not. Bingham clearly feels that detention without trial is one of the key issues that has been eroded in recent years. In Britain in 1997 the maximum time someone suspected of terrorism could be held without charge was four days. In 2000 it was seven days; in 2003 fourteen days; in 2006 twenty-eight days. Subsequent attempts to raise it further to forty-two or even ninety days have so far been defeated in Parliament.

American activities have been an order of magnitude larger and more concerning, with the Pentagon said to have conceded that some 80,000 people have been detained in various ‘black’ sites around the world, some on no charge at all. Various Supreme Court decision have spanked the administration over its behaviour – Rasul v Bush, Hamdan v Rumsfeld, Boumediene v Bush are key – as legislators attempted to stay one step ahead by creating new laws which would make outrages more technically permissible. The same could be said for torture, which was redefined in such a way as to allow, at least tacitly, what later happened at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Obama rolled some of this back, but of course Guantánamo is still a constant affront to many of the basic rights that, until recently, the United States had resolutely stood for, including the right to a fair trial, habeas corpus, the rejection of torture, and so on. This is how a great country can very easily surrender its previous claims to moral authority.

Bingham casts a lot of this debate, with great clarity, as an ancient and long-running showdown between Cicero's maxim Salus populi suprema est lex (‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’) and what he describes as the ‘preferable’ stance of Benjamin Franklin, that ‘he who would put security before liberty deserves neither’. He applies this to an interesting discussion of recent surveillance legislation, although events have moved on so quickly since this book was published, with Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA, that you'll need to supplement these parts with some more contemporary reading.

Overall this is a very, very clear outline of what people are entitled to expect from legislative frameworks, and how we got there. It convinced me again of the importance of having supra-national bodies that can hold countries to account, at least in theory – but more than that it's just a pleasure to read, and should give you a good basis for working out your own thoughts about how courts work, how justice is pursued, and how countries behave on the international stage. ( )