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What is the functional difference from the “law” being the whims of a king, and the “law” being an incompressible mess where you are always guilty, but selectiv

• anm89 6y ago
  Lots of things that are the same in some outcomes are very different in process. A totalitarian dictator and democratic judicial system could come to the same decision on any given ruling.
• guerrilla 6y ago
  In the former case, there's only one person and a court to please, in the latter case, there's millions of people who can violate you. (Not intending to argue for monarchy here, ha, just came out that way.)
• throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >What is the functional difference from the “law” being the whims of a king, and the “law” being an incompressible mess where you are always guilty, but selectively prosecuted? Marketing, plausible deniability and the ability of the higher levels of the system to tell the lower levels of the system to knock it off when they're being jerks under the color of law. Monarchy worked so well for so long because the king didn't want to see his resources pissed away using the government to prosecute crap that didn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things.
• unishark 6y ago
  That's why both are described as "rule of man" rather than rule of law.