More commonly, scholars argue that RL encapsulates the heady notion that law should govern human affairs with quality and attention to the virtues and values that make up a good legal system; and, moreover, the governors should be governed by law.
43 Political and legal theorists typically frame the concept of the rule of law around a series of qualities of good law. These basic qualities might be very broad and even opaque (as in Aristotle’s declaration that “the law is reason unaffected by desire”); 44 or they may drill deeper into the structure of the legal system in promulgating particular rules of the road (as in the insistence on prospective, rather than retrospective legal rules).45
But the framework as it has been revisited and refined over the centuries highlights the fundamental normative point that a good legal system is effective only