Luc B. Tremblay Rule of Law, Justice, and Interpretation

Annotation

Tremblay's theory of the rule of law involves a set of practical principles that constitute the ideal type of a conception of law that is both constitutive and regulative of legal discourse and practice. Tremblay examines two competing ideal types, the "rule of law as certainty" and the "rule of law as justice." The former, a standard doctrine within contemporary legal, social, and political theory, is shown to be incoherent. Thus the "rule of law as justice," he shows, provides the best basis for understanding legal discourse in general and Canadian constitutional law in particular. Tremblay offers a coherent reconstruction of Canadian law from fundamental principles of the rule of law as justice and tests the theory through applications to key judicial decisions that have proven resistant to positivist interpretation.