Today is 12th anniversary of Beijing Olympic. Dated back to the night of 08/08/2008, I was came back from Haikou to Dongfang, with my grandparents. That is a clear memory in my life. Not for a grand time in China, but for a time for me accompanied by my grandparents.
Today, I start to read a new book, The Rule of Law, written by Tom Bingham, who is a former judge of Britain. It is light me that at the beginning of this book, Tom Bingham displayed many explanations about the expression “the rule of law” of different scholars and judges. He did not laid down his idea about the expression.
The expression ‘the rule of law’ first appearance in An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, by A. V. Dicey, a professor of English law at the Oxford. There are three meanings of the rule of law defined by Dicey:
We mean, in the first place, that no man is punishable or can lawfully be made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary courts of the land.
We mean in the second place, when we speak of “the rule of law” as a characteristic of our country, not only that with us no man is above the law, but (which is a different thing) that here, every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary tribunals.
There remains yet a third and a different sense in which “the rule of law” or the predominance of the legal spirit may be described as a special attribute of English institutions. We may say that the constitution is pervaded by the rule of law on the ground that the general principles of the constitution (as for example the right to personal liberty, or the right of public meeting) are with us the result of judicial decisions determining the right of private persons in particular cases brought before the courts; whereas under many foreign constitutions the security (such as it is) given to the rights of individuals results, or appears to result, from the general principles of the constitution.