About this video
This video explains the rule of law as the idea that nobody is above the law, in contrast to divine right monarchs like Louis XIV who claimed 'I am the state'. It shows that the U.S. Constitution rests on the premise that a body of human-made law stands above everyone, including the president, with the Supreme Court interpreting it, which was a radical shift in about a hundred years.
You'll be able to
- explain what 'nobody is above the law' means.
- contrast divine right monarchy with the rule of law.
- explain how the U.S. Constitution puts the rule of law into practice.
Key words
- rule of law
- The idea that nobody, not even the ruler, is above the law.
- divine right of kings
- The belief that kings are chosen by God alone and so can stand above the law.
- despotism
- Rule by one person with unlimited power.
- tyranny
- Cruel and unfair rule by someone with too much power.
- antecedent
- Coming before something else; the Constitution comes before and above everyone in government.
Transcript
[MUSIC] Rule of law is as opposed to rule of whoever. The rule of law basically says that nobody is above the law. Even the monarch who is elected by God alone in this magical electorate of one system that they imagine under the divine right kings, in which the king really can be above the law. He can call parliament when he wants, he can dissolve parliament when he wants, and ultimately, these monarchs are imagining that no aspect of rule is beyond their capacities.
Louis XIV, wonderfully encapsulates this in his famous phrase [FOREIGN]. I'm the state. When a single person becomes the state, when the body of the monarch, when the human person overlaps completely with the imagined entity of the state, there's other words for that, that's despotism, that is tyranny, and theorists in the 17th and 18th century began to call it as such.
To invoke a new idea of the rule of law by which it was human created laws that ultimately stood above all other human beings. The U.S. Constitution fundamentally lies on that premise, that there is a body of laws that while created by human beings and not God, so it's not the 10 commandments, but that there is a body of law that is so transcendently important that it stands behind antecedent to all other aspects of the state. That is the rule of law, and that is why we have a Supreme Court to interpret what that supreme antecedent law is that comes before you, it comes before me, it comes before the president. Even the president of the United States is beholden to what is written in the U.S. Constitution. That's really new. If you go from Charles I and Charles II,
in the 17th century to the rule of law that you see in the U.S. Constitution, a mere hundred years later, the turnaround is so radical.
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