All of us in the modern West grew up believing that we were living under "the rule of law." The truth, however, is that the rule of law – the sovereignty of law – ended a couple of centuries ago. And by losing it, we lost a primary driver of our civilization.

The sovereignty of law was never perfect, of course… it had to be applied by actual human beings… but it engaged the better aspects of human nature and thrived along with them. The systems that replaced it, on the other hand, thrive mainly upon human weaknesses.

What "rule of law" means to people today is that a single set of rules applies to everyone equally. That's not remotely true in practice, of course, but that failure doesn't make the concept bad: implementation in the real world always introduces problems. What makes our "rule of law" deeply and even fatally flawed is the part that's not included in the slogans: the fact that a small group of law-makers stand above the law, not below it.

Unlike the rest of us, if the law-makers don't like the way the law applies to them, they are free to change it, and can nearly always do so without consequences.

In the old days of Western civilization, no one was above justice. Law was sovereign over everyone. And that version of law was not made; rather, it was discovered. The judges of that era didn't write edicts, they discovered and explained what was just or unjust in particular cases.

That sounds foreign and even wrong to many modern people, but it worked very well for more than a thousand years; in certain areas of modern legal systems it still functions. But to make this idea clear, there is one thing you must understand… something that strikes moderns as terribly foreign and even impossible, even though it founded Western civilization and maintained it over most of its run:

Law, in those days, was not legislation. In fact there was no legislation of our kind over all those centuries.

The law books that were published at the time were collections of the reasonings noted above, not edicts and threats of force.