ABSTRACT
In this paper I aim to redefine and reinforce the idea of the rule of law as the basic legitimacy condition of legislation. In contrast with the formal, substantive and process-oriented conceptions of the rule of law, I present a strong structural conception of the rule of law. This conception has the following features. First, it is based on the concept of law as a project for justice. The justice-claim of law is the central component of this concept of law. It implies that law is committed to opening the institutional route for subjecting itself to incessant critical review of its justice. This commitment constitutes the core of the rule of law on this conception. Second, it is based on the underlining common concept of justice as distinguished from specific competing conceptions of justice like libertarian or egalitarian rights-based doctrines, utilitarianism and so on. But the underlining concept of justice is not rendered into the purely formal idea of justice such as the one presented by Perelman. It is identified as the stronger moral (not just linguistic) principle of universalization that implies the requirement of reversibility and public justification. Third, specific components of the rule of law are extensionally identified as those structural principles which H.L.A. Hart and Lon L. Fuller presented, but they are intentionally reinterpreted as protecting justice-review of law, not merely its predictability. I argue that this strong structural conception of the rule of law can offer the basis of public legitimacy of legislation that transcends the partisan strife where rival forces with differing specific conceptions of justice compete for victory in legislative politics. It offers normative constraints upon what the political victors can do to the losers in such a way that the losers can respect the products of legislative politics as public decisions of their political society rather than as the private wills of victors.
