The World Justice Project publishes a “Rule of Law” Index. For 2016 the nations with the highest scores were Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Germany outranked Singapore, which in turn outranked the United States. Russia and Ecuador were tied at the relatively low 45th position, but both were above Bolivia (104) and Venezuela, which came in dead last. The Index attempts to measure compliance with what its sponsors identify as “universal principles of the rule of law.” These are that “[t]he government and its officials and agents as well as individuals and private entities are accountable under the law,” that “laws are clear, publicized, stable, and just, are applied evenly, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property,” that “[t]he process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient,” and that “[j]ustice is delivered by competent, ethical and independent representatives and neutrals who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.”1 Some of these universal principles replicate in other terms Lon Fuller’s famous list of elements of the rule of law; others go beyond Fuller’s minimum requirements.

Byzantium continued traditions of slaveholding it inherited from the Roman Empire, but these were transformed significantly from the fourth century onward as slavery came to play a diminished role in the generation of economic surplus. Laws governing slaveholding gradually diminished the power of slaveholders and improved the rights of slaves by restricting a master’s right to abuse, prostitute, expose, and murder slaves and their children. Legal norms also eliminated penal servitude, opened the door wider to manumission, and created new structures for freeing enslaved war captives through the agency of the Christian church. Simultaneously, new forms of semi-servility arose with the fourth-century invention of forms of bound tenancy, which largely replaced the need for slaves. Byzantine society commonly used slaves in household and industrial contexts but only sporadically for agriculture, although slave prices remained constant through the eleventh century and even increased beginning in the thirteenth century as Italian traders turned Constantinople and Crete into conduits for slave commerce from the Black Sea. From the fourth century onward, Christian discourse began questioning slavery as contrary to natural and divine law, a tradition that continued throughout Byzantine history without ever leading to a call for abolition.

That a concept in common use, such as the rule of law, may be called essentially contested is not a criticism of that concept. Quite the contrary: “essentially contested” is a theoretical designation that draws attention to the way in which arguments about the meaning of a given concept contribute to our understanding and evaluation of the systems, practices, and actions to which the concept is applied.

For readers of legal philosophy, the title of this entry is likely to generate an expectation of a discussion that runs something like this. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of the rule of law began to figure prominently and problematically within the long-standing debate between legal positivists and natural lawyers about the connections between law and morality. The question that presented itself for answering was the following. Could the positivist “separability thesis” – the argument that there is no necessary connection between law and morality – be said to hold with respect to the connection (if any) between the concept of “law” and the concept of “the rule of law”?

This chapter analyzes scholarly approaches to the study of slave agency and resistance. It focuses on medieval contexts including Spain, Italy and Venetian Crete, and the Islamic Middle East. Even though legal, economic, and social structures were unfavorable for enslaved people, individuals were able to use law and limited social capital to advance their own interests. At times this allowed enslaved people to resist slavery and to challenge their legal status. In other instances, enslaved people used their rights as slaves (and, for example, sometimes as mothers or members of a confessional group) to seek certain benefits. In the Islamic world, enslaved and freed people could gain high status by virtue of their marriages and roles as mothers (in the case of women) and as a result of their military and political skills (mainly men and eunuchs). Women who were highly skilled musicians and courtesans could also use their talents to achieve reknown and, in exceptional cases, great wealth. Acts of everyday and extreme resistance are also documented for the medieval period, though these activities never resulted in a successful slave revolt despite what some historians have written about the ninth-century Zanj rebellion in Iraq.

The rule of law is a sane idea gone big. Ever since Albert Venn Dicey, in 1885, popularized the phrase to describe the English way of law, it has left an indelible mark on societies the world over, and not always in a beneficial way.4 Unmoored from the context in which – and for which – it was first formulated, the idea has turned into a doctrine, some even think of it as an ideology. With its ancient origins, medieval roots, and modern instantiations, the idea of the rule of law – known by most, contested by many – has informed local and global ways of life like few other figments of our imagination.

The central concept of Truth and Method is the understanding. It provides an account of how we understand things. We understand things interpretively. This chapter discusses understanding as ߢpractical know-howߣ and as agreement. Understanding has a cognitive, a practical, and a linguistic element. Understanding is contextual and circular. The hermeneutical circle is the heart of the Gadamerߣs notion of the understanding.

This chapter examines the social history of slavery in the early Ottoman Empire. Arguing that the range of forms of enslavement and forced labour practiced in the Ottoman Empire cannot be described by the current ‘universal’ definitions of slavery, this chapter looks at the role of slavery in Ottoman dynastic politics, the social history of military and administrative slavery, and the slavery of skilled workers as central to the economic production of the early modern urban centres of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter concludes with an examination of the legal categories that were applied to different forms of slavery and manumission, and presents to the reader to a range of primary and secondary sources for the research of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

This Companion provides an introduction to the theory and history of the rule of law, and thus to one of the most frequently invoked – and least understood – ideas of legal and political thought. Not so long ago, the “rule of law” was regarded as a rather esoteric expression, one employed by common lawyers – alongside such expressions as the Rechtsstaat, État de droit, and Stato di diritto that their continental confrères invoked – to identify certain technical features of the legal systems in which they worked.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is concerned with the experience of understanding that takes place in living language. Living language is a matter of conversation and dialogue. Conversation and dialogue always take place in a living language within the historical context of a tradition. Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges philosophy’s usual focus on the logic of statements. This is a profoundly Socratic-Platonic idea. The world is presented in language as a communicative event which is dialogical. The dialectic of the word in hermeneutics has a speculative structure.

This chapter considers South India, in the period of 500-1500 CE, focusing particularly on the region that is today Tamilnadu. Based primarily on the evidence of stone inscriptions, as well as religious literature composed in Tamil, it argues that slavery must be understood within the framework of a large and complex system of dependency and hierarchy. Virtually all members of society – whether attached to the land or land-owners, or part of the “households” of Hindu temples or royal courts – were bound into relationship of dependency. These relationships were not systematized and caste identities and hierarchies were not fixed. Categories of persons evidently of “lowly” status, such as the paraiyar, might in some cases have been enslaved agricultural laborers but also appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons. Women who were sold to temples were assigned menial domestic duties but sometimes also performed high-status ritual services. The social reality of servitude and slavery in medieval South India, especially in connection with what was probably the extensive use of slaves in rice cultivation (from the 13th century onward), is only hinted at in the inscriptional sources, and in Hindu religious literature was transformed into an idiom of devotion.

The Black Sea, Russia, and eastern Europe exported slaves throughout the medieval period. Most had been born free but were enslaved through capture or occasionally through sale by relatives. During the eighth through tenth centuries, slaves were traded from eastern Europe and the Baltic to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dniepr and Volga river systems, the Carolingian empire, and Venice. In the thirteenth century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. People enslaved in the Baltic now tended to be traded westward rather than eastward; people enslaved in eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into Italian, Mamluk, or Ottoman hands; and people enslaved in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans. Many aspects of this trade deserve further study, however, such as political marginality and decentralization as factors that enabled slaving; violations of the principle that slaves should come from a different religious background than their owners; and the logistics of local slave trades.

A wave of populism is now sweeping across the advanced democracies in the northern hemisphere, overturning the conventional sense that since the mid-twentieth century populism has been primarily a phenomenon of countries with personalized, presidential political systems and radical inequalities, with Latin American countries providing prominent examples. Populism evidently poses a major challenge to prevailing political systems, placing pressure in particular on established patterns of partisanship and hence on political parties. These factors, along with increasing reliance on “directly democratic” decision-making mechanisms such as referenda, raise questions about some very basic aspects of the rule of law and other features of modern constitutionalism.