Lent Reader 2026: The Rule of Law in a Fluid, Dangerous World

The below is a transcript of Master Eleanor Sharpston’s Reading, which she delivered at Reader’s Feast on Wednesday 20 May 2026.

Blink and you’ll miss it: so brief was the reference that was made in my constitutional law lectures at Cambridge to the rule of law. Admittedly we are talking about what was taught at a respectable university during the Second Neolithic Age – I read a single year’s worth of law at Cambridge in the academic year 1976/77. (Yes. I know. Perhaps on reflection that was actually the First Neolithic Age.) But seriously: both the rule of law and its importance were pretty much taken for granted in those far off, halcyon days.

I’m guessing that about half of you – maybe more – are more or less familiar with the definition of the rule of law propounded by Lord Bingham in the lecture that he delivered in Cambridge in 2006. Whilst acknowledging that ‘the meaning of the concept has to some extent evolved over time and is no doubt likely to continue to do so’, Lord Bingham’s formulation of the rule of law was that:

All persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly and prospectively promulgated and publicly administered in the courts.

Lord Bingham duly expanded on that definition with eight principles, which he discussed in greater length in his subsequent book, The Rule of Law.

I am not particularly qualified to spend the next 40 minutes asking whether Lord Bingham identified all the right criteria or whether we should be looking in parallel at what has been said by – for example – the World Justice Project and the European Commission and be focusing on various fundamental pillars: accountability, just laws, open government, impartial justice, and the separation of powers.

Nor am I disposed to use this unique occasion to do so. I have a simpler starting point. As one of our distinguished guests this evening, Professor Daniel Sarmiento, once memorably observed, ‘the rule of law should be part of the DNA of every lawyer’. Not just those who do public law, or human rights law, or international law. Every one of us. Not because we’d like to make a decent living and forge a successful professional career. But because the entire structure of the comfortable, civilized society in which we would all like to live out our lives depends on the rule of law: on respect for its structures, its values, its constraints. Absent the rule of law, we shall be back in a dystopian world. As Thomas Hobbes famously argued in Leviathan, the ‘state of nature’ (that is, life without laws, government, or civilization) is a perpetual war of all against all, where people act entirely out of self-interest. Absent a ruling authority to keep order and enforce laws, human life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Now, my title for this evening is deliberately ambiguous. The ‘fluid, dangerous world’ to which I there refer might be taken to be the external world of international relations; and indeed, I shall be visiting that world in the second half of this reading. But I should like to start closer at home, with the domestic world of a single society, a single nation state. I shall be suggesting that that world is also, in its way, now both fluid and dangerous.

The Domestic World of the Single Nation State

Why does the rule of law matter in that internal, domestic context?

The short answer is, because without respect for and willingness to abide by a rules-based order, civilized life as we know it becomes unattainable. If I am driving peaceably the right way down a one-way street, I need to feel confident that I am not going to meet some lunatic hurtling towards me from the opposite direction, who has taken that route because it happens to be his convenient short cut from A to B. Every day I enter into contracts. I expect my neighbours to take reasonable care for my safety and respect my rights (notably my property rights!). I rely on public bodies to comply with their various obligations towards me as a citizen. At that most basic level I depend on what in French we call l’État de droit, for which ‘the rule of law’ is a rather clumsy and inaccurate translation: a parallel concept, perhaps, rather than an exact equivalent.

Those two former students of this Inn, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Henry Sheares, whose portraits appear in your menu for this evening, were moved by the same spirit as had given birth to the French Revolution. As United Irishmen, they envisaged a sovereign Ireland, freed from the yoke of imperial Britain. But their idealized Ireland – for which both gave their lives – was not intended to be a law-free zone. Rather, it would be an Ireland for Irishmen, governed by Irish laws. (They were unfortunately a couple of centuries too early to appeal to the principle of self-determination in international law.)

An integral part of the civilised world bounded by laws in which we enjoy living is respect for core values and fundamental rights. Because that respect is under threat from populism, I need to spend a little time addressing populism and looking at why it poses a threat to the rule of law.

Let me begin with my layman’s definition of what I am talking about. Populism is a political movement that bases itself on current sentiments that are perceived to be widely held and proposes simple sound-bite solutions to the concerns expressed.

And here is a layman’s focus on some observed characteristics of populism.

Populism arises out of a sense of grievance. ‘We’ are being left out, being left behind. We can’t get decent jobs or houses, a good education for our kids, swift access to healthcare (and so on). The material good life is out there, being dangled before our noses on television, by incessant consumer advertising; but we don’t stand a chance of getting our hands on it.

Populism, then, comprises both a sense of entitlement and an indignant sense of victimhood. And if I’m a victim it must be someone else’s fault. So, let’s identify an ‘other’ on whom to pile the blame. They are stealing what we should obviously have: what we are naturally entitled to. Obviously, the solution is then to ‘deal with’ them: to stop them claiming benefits or wealth that should be ours, to get rid of them out of our body politic. Ideally this should be combined with (false) patriotic rage at surrendering our values and our (imagined) absolute control over our destinies to a pack of bloody furriners. If a charismatic strongman (or woman) is broadcasting the message, so much the better. We can surrender our individual responsibility as citizens for civic engagement and – like the Hamelin rats – just follow the Pied Piper.

Note that some of the grievances may objectively be justified. If and to the extent that they are, the machinery of our democracy must – I do mean, ‘must’ – find a way of addressing them. But as James Cleverly MP ruefully observed in a BBC interview last weekend, ‘we have been calibrated to believe that everything should be instant’. So those charged with the governance of the country cannot afford to let genuine problems fester for years, for decades. Our theoretical bases for Parliamentary democracy owe more intellectually to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social than to Thomas Hobbes. If we allow a widespread view to develop that the social contract isn’t working any more for the ordinary voter, the rule of law will be up there in the firing line.

Also note, please, how disregard for law becomes normalised during this process. The words ‘taking a legalistic approach’ are used as the equivalent – naturally pejorative – of ‘if we look at the applicable law …’. Serious legal words and concepts are routinely trivialised and weaponised.

I suggest that the hallmark of populism is an over-simplistic analysis of problems that may have complicated causes. There are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there, peddling magical solutions and pinning the blame for those problems on the other whom we are then encouraged to demonise. Populism thus comes paired with disregard for existing formal constraints (both legal and moral) on ‘taking it out’ on that other group. But once they are viewed as ‘the other’ – as being in some sense inferior to us, even (subtly) less human than us – it doesn’t matter getting rid of them.

If we believe – I hope we do all still believe – in certain inalienable core values and respect for fellow human beings, that should be anathema to us. Our bulwark against populism and the moral fluidity of populism is the rule of law. We have seen in history, in the Germany of the 1930s, the dark path down which such populism so easily leads. As a young German Labour Court judge, Otto Kahn-Freund (the first portrait in your menus) ruled in 1933 in favour of radio employees dismissed by the nascent Nazi regime, holding that the claims against them of ‘communist sabotage’ were trumped-up charges. That led to his immediate suspension. Fortunately, he read the writing on the wall and escaped to the UK in 1933, to the great benefit of legal scholarship in this country.

Perhaps a partial answer to the question, ‘why should those who feel that they are being unfairly excluded, shut out, or not heard buy into the current rules-based system?’ is that the alternative is the breakdown of democratic, values-based society as we know it. Even those who would advocate disapplying certain laws and protections for others are (it turns out) very keen on having other laws and protections from which they themselves benefit fully applied and upheld. But you cannot opt for a selective application of the rule of law (‘only the bits that I like!’). If you make it your business to denigrate and belittle the rule of law – be careful what you wish for. Sooner or later those who are pulling down the house may be shouting for workmen to come in and prop up the roof.

The International World

From the domestic, internal case for the rule of law I turn to the external, international world of sovereign states: the world displayed with such beautiful craftsmanship on the Molyneux Terrestrial Globe that features in your menus.

I hope that you have also been admiring there the two book covers from works describing, respectively, the wars that preceded the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the dramatic effects of that groundbreaking international agreement. In bringing to an end the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, that treaty established key principles of international law, including the concepts of state sovereignty, territorial integrity and the legal equality of sovereign nations.

Three centuries (and alas many wars) later, there was yet another internecine European contest – World War Two – that raged over the territory depicted in the print from Europa, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and far beyond. In its aftermath, in a bold and dramatic move, the recent enemy nations of France and Germany, together with their Benelux neighbours and Italy, created the European Coal and Steel Community to place together under common control the two key components of warfare – coal and steel – and render future conflict impossible. That was followed in short order by the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC). Over time the EEC morphed into the ‘European Communities’ and then the European Union: that noble experiment in binding together sovereign states in Europe, not by force of arms and conquest, but by consensus and a pooling of their sovereign power in an État de droit – a grouping under the rule of law. Thanks to the generosity of this Inn, which entrusted a cheerful, idealistic and very ignorant young pupil with its European law scholarship (the Sir Peter Bristow Award), I am deeply happy to have been able to spend my professional life enmeshed in the ‘European project’ as counsel, academic and Advocate General. That project – quintessentially a ‘rule of law project’ rather than a ‘might is right project’ – is eminently worth a lifetime’s dedication and service.

Now, the current President of the United States – or POTUS, as he is regularly called on the social media platforms that are his preferred means of communication with his fellow countrymen and with the world – has been exceptionally generous over the last few months. He has provided me with ample material for an entire lecture series, rather than a mere after dinner reading in Hall. The problem has been selection: winnowing down his rich offerings into a digestible menu for this evening.

Put simply, POTUS has dedicated his second term in the White House to ripping up the rules-based world order (he has also done his best internally to undermine several of the ‘fundamental pillars’ of the rule of law identified by the World Justice Project and the European Commission).

Here is a short, non-exhaustive list of the international illustrations.

Let’s begin with Canada: a proud, happily independent big neighbour of the USA. If you thought international law and self-determination mattered, you would not cast covetous eyes northwards, refer to the Canadian Prime Minister as ‘Governor’, and repeatedly say that to avoid the application of the swingeing tariffs that you have just decided unilaterally to impose, Canada should take the obvious route and become the USA’s 51st state.

After Canada, Greenland. No matter that the USA already has treaty arrangements with Denmark that permit extensive US military use of Greenland. POTUS was happy to tell a NATO ally that the USA ‘must’ have Greenland and threaten to take it over by force. And self-determination for Greenlanders? Not so much.

Then, there was the impressively well-organised SEALS raid to remove the elected leader of an independent Latin American country – President Maduro of Venezuela – and spirit him away to US territory to stand trial there. Militarily, it was a big success story with no American casualties (POTUS blithely made no mention of those killed on the ‘other’ side of the raid). I’m still waiting to read a convincing legal justification for this extraterritorial arrest, exfiltration and detention of a serving head of state.

Following up on that raid, POTUS turned his attention to Cuba and decided it was time to strongarm that country’s legitimate government by cutting off the oil supplies that had previously flowed there from Venezuela.

And then there’s Iran. First, there was the bombing of three nuclear sites on Sunday 22 June 2025 in ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ during the Twelve Day War between Iran and Israel. Then, on Saturday 28 February 2026, POTUS launched his full-blooded war of choice by executive order, creating parallel chaos for international shipping and international law in the Strait of Hormuz.

This is not about whether you think that the government of Iran is a model government that respects human rights. Most of us don’t think that. It is about the legitimacy of armed intervention by Presidential order. Under US constitutional law, Congress, not the President, decides on waging a full-scale war. Under international law, there would need to have been an imminent threat to the USA to justify such a pre-emptive attack as legitimate self-defence. Where was that ‘imminent threat’? The absence of consistent, clearly defined objectives makes it correspondingly less easy to discern any plausible legal justification for the action taken. Enjoying the fun of showing off as the Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces does not qualify.

And yet even a transactional, non-moral approach to international relations requires that I should feel able to trust you to deliver what is written down on the piece of paper that we have now jointly signed. Presumably, POTUS’s ‘take’ on that is that as long as I can bully you, you will have to deliver on what you promised me; and it doesn’t matter if I don’t deliver on what I promised you.

I stress again the interaction between populism and the threat to the rule of law. President Trump did not come out of nowhere. And soundbites are the enemy of the rule of law. Whether that be, ‘They’ve always ripped us off!’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, the shorter and punchier the slogan the smaller the space left for thought, analysis or respect for legal constraints.

Please note that if international law seems to have moved to a place that the sovereign States Party feel uncomfortable with, they can take action to guide or change it. Thus, on Friday, 15 May 2026 at their annual meeting in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, the 46 Council of Europe Member States adopted (by consensus) a political declaration underlining and clarifying their view of how the European Convention on Human Rights should operate in the context of migration. Press attention has focused on the ‘reining in’ of the scope of Article 3 (the prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (the protection of family life). The States’ ‘deep and abiding commitment’ to the Convention, and their support for the independence of the European Court of Human Rights, got less emphasis in the media coverage.

Those of us who have done ‘Strasbourg cases’ know well that the Convention is a living instrument; and the acceptability of law is a key element in maintaining respect for the rule of law and compliance with legal obligations. I only add that the essence of the rights protected by the ECHR must remain untouched. We must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Endpiece

I want to conclude this reading by asking you to call up, in your mind’s eye, the statue that Banksy installed overnight on Wednesday, 29 – Thursday, 30 April 2026 in Waterloo Place, Westminster (just off the clubland of Pall Mall). It’s a striking statue. A man in a business suit proudly lifts an enormous flag and strides confidently forward (no doubt he has a soundbite to accompany the standard). But the huge flag has blown back over his face. He’s walking blind – and he’s about to step off the edge of the plinth.

So it is, I suggest, with our present times and the rule of law. There are plenty of confident flagbearers beckoning us to follow them. Their preferred paths blind them to the dangers inherent in dismantling the rules-based legal order on which our comfortable civilized lives depend.

We do not want to step out into that void.

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