Dicey thought that, quote, the supremacy of the rule of law contained three distinct, though related, concepts. And the first concept, and as I was reading this again last night, I thought... It really does embrace the second, which I'll come to.
The first was this, and I quote, no man, there's the sexist bit, no man is punishable or can lawfully be made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law. The second meaning of the rule of law, as propounded by Dicey, was this, and again I quote, it's not only that with us, the English, no man is above the law, is his first meaning, but what is a different thing, that here in England, every man, whatever be his rank or condition is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals. The emphasis in this passage is on the word ordinary, the ordinary law and the ordinary courts. In short, what he was driving at was that In England, and he saw this as an aspect of the rule of law, there is not a special body of courts that deal with the exceeding of authority by officials of the state. Rather, the ordinary law governing wrongs done between private individual supplies, and the remedy for those wrongs is to be had in the ordinary courts.
And Professor Dicey saw that notion of the officials of the state being subject to the ordinary law of tort as an aspect of the rule of law. The third of Dicey's features of the rule of law was described by him in this way. The general principles of the Constitution as, for example, the right to personal liberty or the right of public meeting. are with us, the English, the result of judicial decisions determining the rights of private persons in particular cases brought before the courts. Whereas, by contrast, under many foreign constitutions, the security, and then he adds the words, such as it is, given to the rights of individuals, results or appears to result from the...
general principles of the constitution. Now what he was getting at here is the system of the common law in which the law is built up through the decisions of courts on the individual facts of individual cases. And Professor Dicey thought somehow that that was a better way of protecting the rule of law than having a top-down.
set of general principles, even general principles enshrined in the Constitution.