Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law (in a Constitutional Democracy)

Authors

Imer Flores, Georgetown Law CenterFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

In the hunt for a better--and more substantial--awareness of the “law,” The author intends to analyze the different notions related to the “rule of law” and to criticize the conceptions that equate it either to the sum of “law” and “rule” or to the formal assertion that “law rules,” regardless of its relationship to certain principles, including both “negative” and “positive” liberties. Instead, he pretends to scrutinize the principles of the “rule of law,” in general, and in a “constitutional democracy,” in particular, to conclude that the tendency to reduce the “democratic principle” to the “majority rule” (or “majority principle”), i.e. to whatever pleases the majority, as part of the “positive liberty,” is contrary both to the “negative liberty” and to the “rule of law” itself.

Publication Citation

Imer Flores, Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law (in a Constitutional Democracy), in LAW, LIBERTY, AND THE RULE OF LAW 77-101 (Imer B. Flores & Kenneth E. Himma eds., Springer Netherlands 2013)

Scholarly Commons Citation

Flores, Imer, "Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law (in a Constitutional Democracy)" (2013). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1115.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1115