Democracy and the Rule of Law

José María Maravall editor Adam Przeworski editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:21st Jul '03

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Democracy and the Rule of Law cover

Addresses why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law.

This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. It interprets the rule of law as a strategic choice of actors with powerful interests, rather than as an exogenous constraint on politicians.This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to la, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest.

"[T]his book is clearly a must read for anyone interested in the question of what causes democracy and/or the rule of law." The Law and Politics Book Review

ISBN: 9780521532662

Dimensions: 228mm x 154mm x 21mm

Weight: 440g

334 pages