The ‘rule of law’ is not just a strapline; it is absolutely necessary both nationally and internationally, as without it ‘poor Liberty lies fetter’d… like a flie in the Cob-web’ (Mercurius Pragmaticus, 1649).
This rhetoric on the importance of the rule of law has a long history—for example, in the Case of Proclamations [1610] 1 WLUK 362 (KB), Lord Coke asserted that the king did not have the power to ‘change the common law, nor create any offence, by his proclamation, which was not an offence before, without Parliament’. In fact, this was quiet rhetoric, because the Proclamations was not a ‘case’ but rather private musings by Coke which he dared not publish in his lifetime, as he wanted to appear as a respectable 17th century gentleman and not a revolutionary.
In more recent years, at the high constitutional level the rule of law has been reluctantly
