ABSTRACT
The ideal of "the rule of law, not of men" calls upon us to strive to ensure that our law itself will rule us, not the wishes of powerful individuals. Before reconsidering the Rule of Law in light of a social practice conception of rules, we must try to define the elements of the Rule of Law. John Rawls claims that the Rule of Law is an aspect of his overall scheme of "justice as fairness." Rawls proposes a rationalist model of law, from which he draws out one version of the traditional complex of ideas that comprise the Rule of Law. A Wittgensteinian view of words, and of the rules containing them, suggests that there is no such thing as traditional formal realizability, or in other words, that the traditional formalist conception of rules is wrong. The reinterpretation wants to pursue turns toward a view of law that emphasizes practice as well as words.
