This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When A. V. Dicey sat down in the 1880s to explain the British constitution to his Oxford law students, he faced an odd problem: the country he was describing did not have one, at least not in the sense his continental European colleagues meant. There was no single document to open, no article one to point to. What held the system together, Dicey argued in his 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, was a working principle he called the rule of law, and he broke it into three parts that are still the starting point for the subject today.
The first part is the supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power. No official, however senior, may punish a person except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary way before the ordinary courts. This sounds obvious until you compare it with systems where a minister's say-so, or a monarch's pleasure, can substitute for a legal charge. Dicey was writing against a background in which continental administrative law seemed to carve out special, more forgiving rules for the state and its officers; his first principle insists that in Britain, the state answers to the same law as everyone else.
Which is exactly his second point: equality before the law. Every person, whatever their rank, is subject to the ordinary law of the land and answerable in the ordinary courts. A government minister who commits a tort is sued in the same courts, under the same rules, as a private citizen who does the same thing. Dicey thought this fusion of accountability, rather than any single written guarantee, was what actually protected English liberty.
The third part is the most distinctively Dicean, and the hardest to summarize without sounding circular: the general principles of the constitution, such as the right to personal liberty or public assembly, are not the source of individual rights but the consequence of them, as decided and enforced by the ordinary courts. Where other constitutions declare rights and then build institutions to defend them, Dicey saw the British arrangement working the other way around. Because courts had, case by case, protected individuals against unlawful arrest and unlawful assembly, a general right existed, resting on the accumulated weight of ordinary judicial decisions rather than on a founding charter.
Modern scholars have pushed back on all three legs of this stool. The sharp line Dicey drew between British and continental administrative law has softened considerably as English law has developed its own body of administrative and public law since his day, and specialists in comparative law now see less of a difference than he claimed. But the three-part formulation itself, right or overstated in its particulars, gave the phrase rule of law a working definition precise enough to argue with, which is a large part of why it is still the reference point on this subject more than a century later. Whatever a later writer wants to say about the rule of law, in almost any legal system, they are still in conversation with the three rules Dicey wrote down in Oxford in 1885.