“Where law ends, tyranny begins.” – John Locke

The quote above is a slightly condensed version of something Locke said in his Two Treatises on Government.  I was once in a discussion group on that book, and as another participant pointed out, the more you read it, the more you realize we live in a very Lockean country.  The social contract, checks and balances, the rule of law, the people as sovereign – it’s all in there.  Thomas Jefferson called Locke one of the three greatest men who ever lived, and no thinker had a greater influence on the writers of the U.S. Constitution.

But what does that quote mean, exactly?  And is it true?

The easiest way to think about it is that if you’re the little guy, the law is all you’ve got.  Every person on Earth is going to spend time (probably a lot of time) around people with more power than he has.  From your parents to your teachers to your bosses to your lenders to your caretakers at the old age home, you are, as Bob Dylan put it, gonna have to serve somebody.  And a certain percentage of those somebodies will have tyrannical instincts.  They’ll enjoy bullying people, using people, making others feel small so that they can feel big.  There are few things more miserable than spending your days under the thumb of a petty tyrant, and that experience – which most of us have, at one point or another – teaches us what we mean by the word “freedom.”  Tyrants are what we particularly want to be free of.

So what happens when you run into one of those people?  What do you do when someone won’t pay you your overtime, or keep his hands off you, or honor your contract?  How do you keep a person with clout from exploiting or extorting or abusing you?  Where do you appeal when you want fairness?

You appeal to the rules.  They may be a company’s procedures, or they may be a community’s laws.  You appeal to a code which is supposed to be enforced impartially, and which was written to prevent injustice.

Does it always work?  Of course not.  Are there miscarriages of justice?  Absolutely.  Is the law sometimes obtuse, or poorly conceived, or unevenly enforced?  No doubt about it.  As a Dickens character once put it, “the law is an ass,” at least sometimes.  Each of us has run into idiotic regulations, or foolish rigidity, or maddening bureaucratic slowness.  Each of us has sometimes wanted to take a machete, or perhaps a chain saw, to all the red tape.

The problem with the chain saw, however, is that the law is all that stands between us and the whims of predators.  Your boss can torment you in any number of ways – unless the law is looking over his shoulder.  Policemen and politicians can take bribes and play favorites – unless the law is looking over their shoulders.  Rich people can amuse themselves by tormenting their subordinates – unless the law is looking over their shoulders.  Slick people can cheat people who aren’t so slick – unless the law is looking over their shoulders.  The law is how we assemble a power greater than that of a petty tyrant.  The law represents our collective power, the power of the community: the power of all of us put together.  And that power is exercised the only way it safely and justly can be, through the regulated actions of our lawful government.

There’s one other thing that should be said about the rule of law: it’s what stands between us and political violence.  Up until now, American elections have not been winner-take-all.  If your side loses an election, you haven’t had to worry that you’ll go to the ATM one day and find your bank accounts drained.  You haven’t had to worry that a black SUV will roll up to your house in the middle of the night and make you disappear.  One of the most important things the law can do is protect the rights of whoever lost the last election.  And because we trust the law to do so, we don’t become so desperate that, when we lose, we take to the streets.  Power can be transferred without violence, because that power has limits.  When the Republicans lost a dubious election in 1960, and the Democrats lost one in 2000, neither side was happy about it, but neither side resorted to violence.  That’s because in the United States, losing an election hasn’t meant losing everything.  Your political opponents can only do so much to you, because they answer to the law.

That isn’t true everywhere.  A lot of countries can’t manage peaceful elections, because their citizens can’t trust the rule of law.  Such countries are not only brutalized, and fearful, but poor.  The officials take bribes.  Contracts are merely suggestions.  There’s no stability, no predictability: every time a new regime grabs power, all the rules change.  A country like that is a lousy place to run a business, which also makes it a lousy place to find a job.

All our nation’s blessings depend upon the rule of law.  A tyrant may seem more stirring, more enlivening, more interesting than the law.  A tyrant has a face, and a personality, often a large, dramatic one.  A tyrant makes us feel things, and we like to feel things.  The law is comparatively colorless.  But lawlessness has never turned out well.  History teaches us that, but if you’re not a student of history, just picture the petty tyrants you’ve known.  Imagine what your job would be like if your bosses weren’t bound by rules.  Imagine what your life would be like if the people who hold some power over you – policemen, teachers, landlords, mortgage officers, judges, tech bros, insurance companies – didn’t have to answer to established principles of justice.

If we value the American way of life – if we think that, in spite of our many lapses over the years, there is an essence which makes this country special – we can do nothing more important than protect that essence.  Which means protecting the rule of law.

~ David Frankel