You will prepare and submit a term paper on Public Law : Critically discuss the extent to which Dicey's vision of the Rule of Law remains relevant to the modern UK Consti. Your paper should be a minim

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Public Law : Critically discuss the extent to which Dicey's vision of the Rule of Law remains relevant to the modern UK Consti. Your paper should be a minimum of 2750 words in length. Thus, the immense contributions that Dicey are far reaching and significant, as shall be seen forthwith. First and on a lighter note, although the term rule of law dates back to ancient civilizations such as ancient China, India, Greece, Mesopotamia and Rome, yet Dicey is known to have played the most pivotal role in popularising it. As a matter of fact, Dicey is the first person to have enunciated the modern description and definition of the rule of law. It is nevertheless important to recon with the fact that the idea of the rule of law is traceable far back to Aristotle, when he observed that it is far better and more superior to have a king who ruled by the law, in lieu of a king who ruled by discretion. Nevertheless, it is Dicey who provided the logical foundation upon which the modern idea of the rule of law is premised. In his 1885 book An Introduction to the Study of the Law of Constitution which is often and simply referred to as Law of the Constitution contended cogently and successfully that: all people are equal before the law. no one is punishable unless he has clearly breached the law. and that there is no set of laws whose authority exceed that of the courts. According to Anderson1, the magnitude of the first of the three postulations above is its allowance and recognition of the civil rights and freedoms and justice for all in the United Kingdom (UK). Civil rights and freedoms and justice for all begin immediately all people are declared equal before the law. To envision a legal postulation contrary to this is to court a system that is awash with impunity, sectarianism, class antagonism and injustice. This is because, equality before the law deals with the dynamics that stem from socio-economic differences, race and different religious and ideological affiliations. The second proposition that Dicey advanced is relevant to the constitution of the UK since it paves way for the process of proper litigation. Merely, punishment is the exclusion or the dereliction of human rights and freedoms that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The import of this is that the state has no authority to remove these rights and freedoms from any of its citizen, without the citizen having committed a crime and the state having established the crime through police investigation and subjecting the citizen to a fair trial. In light of the proposal that Dicey makes in respect to the first two principles, he makes emphasis on personal freedom from arbitrary detention, apprehension and other forms of state-sanctioned punitive acts that may be leveled towards an individual. Dicey divulges that all socio-economic and socio-cultural classes in the United Kingdom were equally subject to the ordinary laws of the land which were being administered by ordinary courts. Waldron2 contends that Dicey would continue that in the same respect, the public and private servants, the rich capital owner, the poor and the middle income earner were to be taken as equally and individually liable for a crime or a tort. However, it is expedient to take stock of the fact that by this, Dicey did not mean to mean equality of duties and rights. For instance, an unpaid tax is in every way, a debt that is due to the state. In this regard, the income-tax department possesses the power to recover this debt, unlike private creditors.