About the Book

The Rule of Law in the Real World gives a comprehensive new theory of the political and legal ideal known as "the rule of law". The rule of law should be understood as the coordinated collective control of power, and matters because it constitutes a morally important kind of social equality. The book develops a case for how those properties should be taken into account in social scientific attempts to measure the rule of law as well as policy efforts to promote it.

This highly interdisciplinary work begins with analytic political philosophy, developing a distinctively egalitarian account of the rule of law and its moral value. It then moves to history and political science. It shows that states with more egalitarian legal systems are likely to do better at sustaining the rule of law than states with inegalitarian systems. It also shows that the self-understanding of participants in political conflict in real-world historical rule of law states---including democratic Athens and seventeenth-century England---understood the rule of law in egalitarian terms.

It then turns to the development enterprise. The book offers a critique of existing empirical measurement strategies for the rule of law as well as an alternative rule of law measure. The new measure is rooted in the philosophical basis of the concept, behaves much as existing theoretical claims about the rule of law would predict (e.g., is highly correlated with economic development: see plots below), and is more readily interpretable than existing measures.

In addition, the book explains how the egalitarian account of the rule of law can support interventions in the debate among rule of law development professionals and scholars between advocates of "bottom-up" and "top-down" development strategies. Finally, The Rule of Law in the Real World calls for the developed states to pay closer attention to promoting and maintaing the rule of law in their own political communities. In particular, it argues that policing in the U.S.---especially the systematic discrimination against African-Americans---is a dire failure of the rule of law.

Reviews and Commentary

Review by Peter Rijpkema in Ethics 127(2): 486-491 (2017).

Review by Andrew Koppelman in The New Rambler Review (March 5, 2020).

The Saint Louis University Law Journal was kind enough to host a roundtable on the Rule of Law in the Real World in Volume 62, issue 2 (2018). The links below go directly to commentary on the book by each of the generous discussants:

• Colleen Murphy
• Robin West
• Matt Lister
• Chad Flanders
• Last and, in this distinguished company, certainly least: my own responses.

About the Author

Paul Gowder is a professor of law and, by courtesy, of political science and philosophy, at the University of Iowa researching constitutional law, ethics, normative and conceptual jurisprudence, political theory, and quantitative legal studies. His areas of speciality (other than the rule of law) include Classical Athenian law, contemporary liberal political philosophy, game theory, predictive modeling, and computational law. He holds a J.D. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. Before joining academia, he worked as a public interest litigator practicing poverty and civil rights law in Oregon and Virginia.

Map of Rule of Law Scores by Country See the Book on Cambridge University Press