The long overdue release of Julian Assange is a victory for the power of protest over the interests of what remains the US and UK military industrial complex. Its also a reminder that although the law is designed primarily to protect the rich and powerful that hasnt worked historically unless the rights of at least some ordinary people are also protected.
Of all the post-1945 figures to have considered the Rule of Law the one who arguably wrote most powerfully on it was E.P Thompson.
He devoted a concluding section of his book Whigs and Hunters to the matter. In the book Thompson looks at the eighteenth century Black Acts which listed a growing number of often petty offences for which offenders could be hanged. It was the period of the ‘Bloody Penal Code’. In practice matters often did not work quite like this as Jurys refused to convict people.
Thompson recognised that defending the Rule of Law from the left was not a popular thing to do He noted that ‘I stand on a very narrow ledge, watching the tides come up’. [p260]. However he argued that ‘it is not possible to conceive of any complex society without law’ [p260].
Indeed as he knew well from his researches, ‘for as long as it remained possible, the ruled- if they could find a purse and a lawyer-would actually fight for their rights by means of law’ [p261].
This was not just an individual thing but a collective position. Thompson argued that the rhetoric of the plebeian crowd, of the free born Englishman’ was centrally focused on ’inviolable privacy.. habeus corpus…equality before the law’ [p264] In other words a workable system of law was basic to a defence of popular rights.
He recognised of course that the law was ‘devised by men of property as a defence against arbitary power’ [p264] but argued that a system that provided defence against arbitrary use of power by authority was important to working people as well as the bourgeois [p266].
In short Thompson saw ‘a whole inheritance of struggle about law’. The Rule of Law and what it means is important in any complex society but it is also something to be argued about, and struggled over not just dismissed.
I strongly agree.