Is the Rule of Law Sacred?

It is not that law enforcement is a French problem but that it has nothing to do with the United States. On the contrary. The current Minister of the Interior, France’s top police officer, recently announced (see Nicolas Bastuk and Samuel Dufay, “L’État de droit est-il sacré?” or “Is the Law of the Law Holy?” in the middle This PointOctober 10, 2024):

The law is inviolable and sacred. [Its] the source is private individuals.

L’État de droit, ça n’est pas intangible ni sacré. [Sa] source, c’est le peuple souverain.

The classic definition of legal freedom can be borrowed from Friedrich Hayek. In his own Law, Law, and Freedomhe related to it

rules that govern the behavior of people towards others, which apply to an unknown number of future situations and contain restrictions that demarcate the boundaries of the protected domain of each person.

The rule of law is “the government of laws” instead of “the government of the people,” as the usual formula says. The so-called “independent people” itself is a group of men only. Hayek believed that, over time, as opposed to political masses, these common laws or laws really come from the opinion of “the people”—which introduces a certain ambivalence to the distinction between the rule of law and popular sovereignty. But like all classical liberals, Hayek was adamant that people should not be considered independent, that is, they cannot have great or unlimited power.

The idea that law is incompatible with the sovereignty of the people is forcefully expressed by Émile Faguet, a French literary critic and historian of political ideas, in his 1903 book. This Liberalisme (Freedom):

[My translation:] If the people rule by virtue, that is exactly what the writers of the Declaration did [the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the one of 1793]people have the right, to have sovereignty, to abolish all the rights of individuals. Such is the conflict. To put in the same declaration the right of the people and the rights of the person, the sovereignty of the people and freedom for example, on the same level, is like putting water and fire and asking them to settle their differences. …

The writers of the Declarations, even the first ones with a slight defect, were democrats and liberals; they believed in both individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people. This led them to put in their work a fundamental objection.

[Original French:] Si le droit du peuple, c’est la souveraineté, ce que precisely ont dit les rédacteurs des Announcementsle peuple a le droit, en sa souveraineté, de supprimer tous les droits de l’individu. Et voilà le conflit. Mettre dans une même declaration le droit du peuple et les droits de l’homme, la souveraineté du peuple et la liberté par exemple, à égal titre, c’est y mettre l’eau et le feu et les prier biensuite’ editor ensemble. […]

Les auteurs des Announcementsmême de la première, quoique moins, étaiten à la fois démocrates et liberaux, et ils creyaient à la fois à la liberté individuelle et à la souveraineté du peuple. Ils devaient mettre dans leur œuvre une antinomie fundamentale.

Heirs of the Enlightenment like the French constitutionalists, the American founders made the same mistake, even if they were more suspicious of popular sovereignty; their descendants did not regret it as time passed. The problem is still very active in today’s America.

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