A Scottish minister flipped the king is law into law is king
In 1644 the Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford titled his attack on the divine right of kings Lex, Rex, meaning the law is king. It reversed the old formula that the king is law. Thomas Paine repeated the idea in 1776, declaring that in America the law ought to be king.
The rule of law means laws are clear, public and consistent, courts are fair and independent, and every person and institution, government included, answers to the same rules. Formalists stress stability and clarity; substantivists fold in human rights and international law. It differs from rule of man, where someone governs arbitrarily, and from what the Chinese scholar Li Shuguang calls rule by law, where statutes are merely a tool of the powerful. China's third-century BCE legalists took that second view, placing emperor and aristocrats above their own laws.
The principle is older than the phrase. Aristotle held that law should govern rather than any single citizen, and that even those with supreme power should act only as guardians of the laws. Plato, though he favoured a philosopher king, warned that a state whose law has no authority of its own is close to collapse. Cicero is quoted as saying we serve the laws in order to be free. Indian texts go further back: an Upanishad calls law the king of kings, and the Mahabharata condemns rulers who rob and ignore their people.
In England, Alfred the Great insisted in the ninth century that his code apply equally to rich and poor, friend and enemy. Catalonia's courts in 1481 bound the royal power of Ferdinand II to the principality's laws. In 1607 Chief Justice Edward Coke angered James I by insisting the king stood under God and the law, and three years later the Commons petitioned James to be governed by the certain rule of law rather than arbitrary power.
James Harrington's Oceana of 1656 praised an empire of laws and not of men, and Locke defined freedom as living under a standing rule common to all. Montesquieu discussed the idea in 1748, Samuel Johnson's dictionary included the phrase in 1755, and A. V. Dicey popularised it in the nineteenth century.
Source: Rule of law
