ABSTRACT
Rule of law is an essentially contested concept. It means different things to different people, and has served a wide variety of political agendas, from Hayekian libertarianism to Rawlsian social welfare liberalism to Lee Kuan Yew’s soft authoritarianism to Jiang Zemin’s statist socialism. That is both its strength and its weakness. That people of vastly different political persuasions all want to take advantage of the rhetorical power of rule of law keeps it alive in public discourse, but it also leads to the worry that it has become a meaningless slogan devoid of any determinative content.
