Grim's Hall

Rule of Law:

There are those among you, my old friends, who are wondering where I of all people get off defending the Rule of Law. It's a fair complaint.

I am an outlaw at heart, and all of you know it. I believe that a free man has, by right, a final appeal:

An appeal to arms, and to the God of hosts!

But we are not talking about the rights of men. We are talking here about two governments--ours (breaking its own laws, in the Plame case) and the French (breaking international laws, about which I normally care nothing, but of which France is the prime exponent).

A government ought to be bound by its laws, even if men may at the last extremity set them aside. By the same token, men who choose to bind themselves to the service of the state, whether from patriotism or for power, have an extra duty to the rule of law that lies not upon the rest.

This is the proper understanding of liberty. Governments are not people. They are our creatures. Men have freedoms, but governments are created by the yielding up of certain enumerated freedoms. Those liberties--those powers--are all that the government has. We have others, which we reserve.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.


Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Because the Government's freedom is a freedom we lay down, freedom for Government from the law can only come by stealing liberties that we did not gladly give. If freedom for men is to be preserved, Law must bind the state.