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Court Shorts: Rule of Law | United States Courts | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Court Shorts: Rule of Law
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Core Theme
The rule of law is a fundamental system of fair, publicly known, and consistently applied rules that ensures accountability for everyone, including the government, thereby enabling peaceful coexistence, protecting individual liberties, and fostering societal prosperity.
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I would describe the rule of law as fairness. It is a set of rules that
everyone needs to abide by. We can't have peaceful interactions with one another
without the rule of law. Our social compact is based on the idea that we are
each and every one of us accountable to the law.
You're right to swing your fist, stops just short of my nose. And that's what
the real law's meant to do. Is to find that boundary between, expression, freedom,
liberty, and everything we want to do, and when we hurt others. For example this
morning I went to buy a breakfast sandwich. And everything that I did to
get that sandwich was related to the rule of law in some way. In the sense
that I was able to cross the street safely because I knew that the people
driving their cars were going to stop at the stoplight,
and I had trust that they were going to do that because there would be
consequences under our law for that. I can get up in the morning and know that
the dollar will be accepted down the street at the grocery store. I can
go to the post service and expect that I can retrieve my mail and that
someone won't take it, or that that someone won't view it without my
permission. I then go and buy the breakfast sandwich. I know that the
company I'm buying the breakfast sandwich from has to follow the rule of
law and with regard to food regulations. So I know that the food I eat is going
to be safe. The company similarly can't overcharge me because there is going to
be penalties for that. It affects our quality of life in that we're able to
sleep at night knowing that tomorrow morning we'll wake up the stock market
will be working, the speed limits will be enforced, the laws will be applied to
each and every one of us.
One of the great things about the rule of law is the protection of minority
rights. Our Constitution has embedded within it, a counter majoritarian
principle. What the Founding Fathers said, was to protect us against the tyranny of
the majority. The most important thing that I've felt from taking the oath was
to make sure that I applied the rule of law in a fair manner to everyone. And
what that means is that 51% of the people, or 90% of the people, can't
deprive the minority of certain inalienable rights. The right to worship,
the right to speak, the freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms,
the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. No matter what
their background, no matter where they came from, no matter what they look like,
and that's what I try to do every day. Is to apply the law fairly and evenly to
every party that's before me. We are bound to follow the law. The law is the
statutes, the law that is written by people who are elected by the people, and
we have to comply with that law. We have to follow the Constitution. New citizens
swear an oath not to the flag or to the President or to America, but to the
Constitution; to our supreme law of the land.
The rule of law means that everybody understands what the law is and
everybody also understands that they will be held to that law. And that
there's no way of getting out of that, including the government. Rule of law
means that the laws are public, people know what they're expected to do, and you
can rightfully hold them to that knowledge. Now I'm not saying you could
go out in the street and give a quiz about the US code every person who's
walking by, but the public nature of the law is critical and the public nature of
the judicial process is critical. After reading a lot about Greek history, Roman
Republic, Roman Empire, all the way forward up to the present day; it was
interesting to see what made civilizations thrive and what made
civilizations fail. And the only civilizations that thrived were
civilizations that emphasized the rule of law.
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