A legal system is not simply a collection of enforceable rules; it is a structural framework that defines the relationship between the individual and society. Its purpose is not to command, but to coordinate organising power through clarity, stability, and justification. The following axioms express the principles by which I evaluate whether a legal system is effective and legitimate.
1. Transparency
The law must be publicly accessible and written in a form that can be understood by the people it governs. A rule that cannot be known in advance, or whose meaning is ambiguous by design, is not law but control by obscurity.
2. Repeatability
The application of legal rules must be consistent across time, actors, and institutions. Identically situated cases must receive comparable treatment unless a principled distinction is offered. The principle of treating like cases alike is not an aesthetic virtue, but a formal requirement for the system to function as a system i.e., as a rule-governed structure rather than a series of isolated commandments.
3. Equality Before the Law
The law must apply uniformly to all subjects of the legal order. There can be no legitimacy in a framework that permits differential application based on wealth, status, or political proximity. Hierarchical exceptions erode the standards of the system by introducing partiality where there ought to be neutrality, undermining the principle of the rule of law.
4. Constrained Fairness (Equity)
Fairness based exceptions known as "equitable principles" in English law are necessary to prevent the mechanical application of rules from producing unjust outcomes. However, such exceptions must be formally integrated into the legal framework. Discretion, where exercised, must be bounded by explicit criteria and accompanied by justificatory reasoning. Unconstrained appeals to equity risk transforming law into arbitrary adjudication.
5. Minimalist
The domain of law should be narrow, not expansive. Its function is to define the conditions of membership in a legal order not to engineer moral outcomes, prescribe virtue, or enforce contested conceptions of the good. Legal intervention should be limited to contexts where coordination, remedy, or non-coercive resolution is otherwise unattainable.
6. Open Access
Access to legal process must not be conditioned upon economic resources. If the capacity to assert or defend a right is functionally unavailable to those without financial means, then the system denies the very conditions of participation it purports to guarantee. Justice, under such conditions, becomes a transaction, not a status.
7. Structural Coherence
The legal system must exhibit internal consistency. Conflicting norms must be ordered by hierarchy; ambiguous provisions must be subject to principled interpretation. Without structural coherence, the system collapses into incoherence, where predictability, accountability, and rule-governed behaviour become impossible.
These axioms are not aspirational; they are conditions of legitimacy. A system that fails to meet them may continue to issue demands, enforce compliance, and resolve disputes—but it does not thereby constitute law in any meaningful or defensible sense. It becomes a mechanism of control: operative, but lacking principled justification for the power it exercises.