President’s Corner > The Rule of Law

The Rule of Law: The Historic Role of Lawyers as Defenders and a New Opportunity as Rule of Law Ambassadors

By Sunitha Anjilvel

Greetings from your Bar president! Spring in the Pacific Northwest always feels like an awakening. If you are feeling similarly energized, I invite you to channel some of that renewed spring in your step for the good of our profession and democracy. The WSBA’s Rule of Law Ambassador Program, which has been in the works for the past year, will launch on Law Day, May 1.

We want to empower legal practitioners—you—to be community leaders and to spread accurate information and build relationships to increase trust in the legal system. We want to empower you to help your friends and neighbors understand the critical importance of an independent legal profession as the cornerstone of our democracy. We want to empower you with knowledge to defend the rule of law, especially as we encounter efforts to erode it.

As the Board of Governors said in a recent statement:¹ “If lawyers and judges are not willing or able to defend liberty and freedom for all people under the law and Constitution, who will?”

To put this question in historical context, it is my pleasure to interview Hugh Spitzer about when and how lawyers have been called upon to uphold their highest ambassadorial obligation to preserve the rule of law. Professor Spitzer is mostly retired from the University of Washington School of Law, where he taught constitutional law, classical Roman law, and professional responsibility.

Please take a journey through history with us, and I hope you will be inspired to step up as a Rule of Law Ambassador. 

SA: What does the “rule of law” really mean?

HS: The “rule of law” is an ideal of political philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of law, rather than arbitrary action, in the political system. In the modern version, “rule of law” has a few key elements: The same laws apply equally to political leaders and community members; the government itself is bound by law; government powers are separated among political actors; the judicial function is independent; and basic human rights are guaranteed to all.

SA: How far back in history does the “rule of law” concept go? 

HS: This concept has been around for thousands of years, in virtually every culture—ancient Egypt, China, Persia, Greece, and Rome, for example. The most basic ideas are that the leaders of a political community are subject to fundamental moral, religious, and legal principles, and that they forfeit their right to rule if they ignore those principles.

SA: Can you share examples from history where the rule of law was undermined? What were the immediate and long-term consequences for those societies?

HS: Lord Shang, who served as prime minister to the fourth century BCEDuke Xiao of Qin [now part of modern-day China], complained that the duke’s heir-apparent had violated the law and wrote that “violations by the upper class are why the law cannot be implemented.”  During the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, several authors observed that the breakdown of Republican institutions was exemplified by armed gangs attacking elected officials and shutting down the courts.

The Roman Republic’s legal system divided power between many separately elected officials, several of whom oversaw dispute resolution processes. But independent “jurists,” or legal thinkers, wrote about and helped develop complex legal topics over the centuries. They also wrote legal treatises and provided legal opinions to lawyers, judges, and government officials.

These jurists were strongly committed to the law as a body of concepts superior to any individual political actors. But starting in the first century CE, Rome gradually became more authoritarian as emperors consolidated power. A number of Roman legal thinkers paid the ultimate price for continuing to insist that the ruler himself was subordinate to law. For example, the Emperor Caracalla had the respected jurist Papinian killed in 212 CE when Papinian refused to issue a legal opinion justifying Caracalla’s murder of his own brother. The death of Papinian can be treated as one symptom of the crumbling empire in the third century.

In our direct legal tradition, there were serious consequences for English kings who asserted that they were above the law. Charles I lost his head in 1649 because he tried to assert one-man rule, ignoring Parliament and transgressing on the people’s rights. Forty years later, James II was deposed and replaced for ignoring English constitutional principles.

Our own Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the 13 colonies were seceding from Britain because George III ignored the British Constitution and the rule of law. The Declaration charges George III with many transgressions, including his refusal to assent to properly enacted laws, interfering with colonial legislative bodies, obstructing the administration of justice, making judges “dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and … payment of their salaries,” and rendering the military “independent of and superior to the Civil power.” In other words, the Americans declared that they were seceding from Britain because the king was consistently violating the rule of law.

SA: What happens when the independence of the judiciary is not respected? Are there historical examples where the erosion of judicial independence led to significant political changes?

HS: As I mentioned earlier, the Romans equated the rule of law with the courts being open and available for business. The English King James I sidelined Sir Edward Coke and then fired him as chief justice of the King’s Bench in 1616, because Coke insisted that the king himself was subject to the Common Law. Coke was also issuing specific rulings that the king disliked. This firing was resented nationwide because people thought the king was tampering with justice. Coke’s ideas ultimately won, contributing to victory of parliamentary authority over royal powers later in the 17th century.

Throughout history, successful dictators crippled independent judiciaries and silenced lawyers who represented their opponents. We saw Hitler do that in the 1930s, and both Russia’s Putin and China’s government doing the same thing in recent history. One recent example of a fight to maintain judicial independence is in Pakistan, where in 2007 President Pervez Musharraf tried to unconstitutionally suspend the chief justice of that country’s supreme court. This led to a massive lawyers’ “Black Coat” revolt, where lawyers went on strike and staged massive demonstrations, dressed in their black robes, to force the reinstatement of the chief justice. This movement led to a change in government, but unfortunately the pressure on Pakistan’s independent court system has resumed.

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This article is reprinted from the April, 2025 issue of Washington State Bar News with the permission of the Washington State Bar Association. Any other use of this material without the express written permission of the Washington State Bar Association is prohibited.