Publicity and the Rule of Law *
Publicity and the Rule of Law *
This chapter explores the requirement that laws should be public. When it is claimed that the Rule of Law requires that the laws should be public, what is to be understood by this claim? How is the relevant notion of publicity to be defined? It argues that the Rule of Law requirement of publicity is best understood in terms of the notion of common, or mutual, knowledge. When it is required that the laws should be public, what should be meant by this is not only that each one of the law's addressees should know what the law is, but also that everybody should know that everybody knows what the law is, that everybody should know that everybody knows that everybody knows what the law is, and so on.
Keywords: laws, public, Rule of Law, public knowledge, common knowledge
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
