The rule of law, once widely embraced and emulated, now faces serious threats to its viability. To get our bearings we must return to first principles. This book articulates and defends a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling conception of the rule of law and defends it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force. The rule of law's ambition, it argues, is to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power using the distinctive tools of the law. Law provides a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting