Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is May 18th and my guest is Richard Epstein, James Parker Hall,

Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the Peter and

Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Richard, welcome back

to econtalk. It's always great to be with you Russ. Our topic for today is the rule of law

in the current situation. Talk about what the rule of law is, first of all, and why it's important,

and then talk about what's going on right now. There is a huge difference in conceptions that

are brought to this particular area. Some of them are relatively minimal and some of them turn

out to be much and more intensive, and let me start with the minimalist conception and then go up

to the stronger conception. The basic notion of the rule of law at its core is the notion that

there are no extraordinary processes and that everybody is going to be subject to the same kinds

of legal system sanctions and courts when they are dealing with offenses, so that essentially the

rule of law under these circumstances is a kind of a parallel provision. You cannot treat me

different from the way in which you treat anybody else, and the theory about the word rule

is that it's designed to capture the fact that it cannot be outhawked with respect to particular

individuals. Now this definition is one that nobody wants to deny, but nobody who's serious about

the subject thinks that it's going to be sufficient to deal with the basic problem, which is how it

is that you take a sovereign, who would otherwise be plenary in its power, and subject it into some

kinds of limitations, so it's to allow the citizens within the realm to prosper. So the second

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