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29 November 2024 / Roger Smith
Issue: 8096 / Categories: Opinion , Rule of law , International
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Rule of law: words are not enough

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It does proponents of the rule of law no harm to admit to its many uncertainties: Roger Smith warns against the temptation to oversimplify

In October, Lord Richard Hermer KC, the Attorney General, gave the 2024 Bingham Lecture entitled ‘The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism’. Speeches praising the rule of law, with nuanced differences of definition, are somewhat of a rite of passage for attorney generals. It is barely more than a year since Victoria Prentis KC was treading the boards on the same topic, albeit with a different angle.

Restoration & resilience

Lord Hermer’s particular take was the need for ‘restoration of our reputation as a country that upholds the rule of law at every turn and… embedding resilience to rebuff the populist challenge’. The challenges of the modern world are, he argued, ‘increasingly global’ and ‘we need a functioning global order, underpinned by a strong commitment to the rule of law, to even begin to tackle them.’ Such an order, at home and

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