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What role do courts play in advancing or upholding the political ideal that we call 'the rule of law'? Does the rule of law require that courts should have authority over all other branches of government, including the legislature? And does it impose constraints on the sort of reasoning and decision-making that courts engage in? This article explores an array of possible answers to these questions, and considers the possibility that the ascendancy of courts in a constitution may represent a form of judicial supremacy that looks remarkably like the uncontrolled rule of men, which the rule of law is supposed to prevent. To preclude that possibility, it is particularly important for courts to recognize that their authority is limited in scope and that they should not be guided by any overall political program other than the program of seeing that constitutional constraints on government are upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rationale of the separation of powers is often elided with the rationale of checks and balances and with the rationale of the disper-sal of power generally in a constitutional system. This Essay, however, fo-cuses resolutely on the functional separation of powers in what M.J.C. Vile called its "pure form." Reexamining the theories of Locke, Montesquieu, and Madison, this Essay seeks to recover (amidst all their tautologies and evasions) a genuine case in favor of this principle. The Essay argues that the rationale of the separation of powers is closely related to that of the rule of law: it is partly a matter of the distinct integrity of each of the sepa-rated institutions---judiciary, legislature, and administration. But above all, it is a matter of articulated governance (as contrasted with com-pressed undifferentiated exercises of power). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The applicability of the ideal we call ‘the Rule of Law’ (ROL) in international law (IL) is complicated by (1) the fact that there is no overarching world government from whom we need protection (of the sort that the ROL traditionally offers) and it is also complicated by (2) the fact that IL affects states, in the first instance, rather than individuals (for whose sake we usually insist on ROL requirements). The article uses both these ideas as points of entry into a consideration of the applicability of the ROL in IL. It suggests that the ‘true’ subjects of IL are really human individuals (billions of them) and it queries whether the protections that they need are really best secured by giving national sovereigns the benefit of ROL requirements in IL. For example, a national sovereign's insistence that IL norms should not be enforced unless they are clear and determinate may mean that individuals have fewer protections against human rights violations. More radically, it may be appropriate to think of national sovereigns more as ‘officials’ or ‘agencies’ of the IL system than as its subjects. On this account, we should consider the analogous situation of officials and agencies in a municipal legal system: are officials and agencies in need of, or entitled to, the same ROL protections as private individuals? If not, then maybe it is inappropriate to think that sovereign states are entitled to the same ROL protections at the international level as individuals are entitled to at the municipal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the obligations that the rule of law imposes upon lawyers in the international domain. It notes that the responsibilities of a lawyer advising the government are different from the lawyer's job in private practice. It also cites that the link between the rule of law and good lawyering in government service applies equally in the international realm as it does in constitutional law as well in administrative law.

The article presents an essay on the general case against judicial review of legislation. It criticizes the judicial review for its lack of reason to suppose the rights are better protected than they would be by democratic legislatures. Also, the essay argues that judicial review is democratically illegitimate. The essay claims that the case against judicial review is not absolute or unconditional because the society in question has good working democratic institutions.