“The rule of law,” Aristotle stated, “is preferable to that of any individual... The law is reason unaffected by desire.” For Aristotle, the rule of law is the opposite of tyranny, while many modern thinkers hold to a wholly instrumentalist conception of the rule of law as the Swiss army knife of human institutions, a useful set of means for accomplishing private ends. The idea of the rule of law thus embodies a competing series of conceptions about the very meaning of law from formal legality to democratic rule to human rights to the institutional embodiment of human dignity. In this seminar we will read leading accounts of the rule of law (from Beccaria to Carl Schmidt to H.L.A. Hart, Joseph Raz, Jeremy Waldron, Gustav Radbruch, and Lon Fuller, etc.). Among the topics covered will be the relation between the rule of law and: morality, democracy, the functioning of the market, human rights, etc. We will use the question of whether the Nazi laws were “valid” laws, and the abolition of torture as central cases for interrogating the larger conceptual questions.