The Benefit of Law

There is a moment in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons that has become, for lawyers and laypeople alike, the definitive dramatisation of the Rule of Law. Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, is confronted in his own home by his family and his zealous son-in-law, William Roper. The man who has just left the room — Richard Rich — is, they insist, dangerous. He is plainly bad. He will betray More. Arrest him, they urge.

More’s answer is maddening to them: Rich has broken no law, and so long as he has broken no law, he goes free.

Then comes the image that gives the scene its enduring power. Roper declares he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil. Roper explodes that More would give even the Devil the protection of the law, and More does not flinch from the charge.

More turns on him: and when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you, where would you hide? England, More says, is planted thick with laws, and if you flatten that forest to chase your enemy, you leave yourself standing exposed in the winds that would then blow. The laws are not obstacles to justice; they are the shelter within which everyone — the innocent, the accused, the unpopular, and even the wicked — stands protected

More says would give the Devil himself the benefit of law, “for my own safety’s sake

More than sixty years after Bolt wrote that exchange, and nearly five hundred years after the real More lost his head, the scene still cuts because it names a temptation that never goes away: the temptation to withhold the law’s protection from people we have already decided are guilty, dangerous, or simply undeserving.

What “the benefit of law” actually means

The benefit of law is the practical face of the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law, in its classic formulation from A.V. Dicey through to modern statements such as Lord Bingham’s, holds that all persons and authorities — private citizens and governments alike — are bound by, and entitled to the benefit of, laws that are publicly made, prospective in effect, and administered by independent courts.

Strip away the theory and it comes down to a set of concrete guarantees: no one may be punished except for a proven breach of an existing law; everyone accused is entitled to a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal; the same law applies to the powerful and the powerless; and anyone — not merely the respectable — may invoke the law’s protection.

That last point is what the scene in More’s house is really about. The benefit of law is not a reward for good character. It is not rationed according to popularity, wealth, citizenship, or moral standing.

Richard Rich is a creature of ambition who will, in time, perjure himself to destroy More — Bolt’s audience knows it, and More half-suspects it.

Yet More’s position is that his suspicion, even his certainty, is legally nothing. The law protects Rich because the law protects everyone, and the moment it protects only some, it protects no one reliably.

Why the protection must be universal

The genius of More’s argument is that it is not sentimental. He does not defend the Devil’s rights out of tenderness for the Devil. He defends them out of self-interest, rightly understood — “for my own safety’s sake.” This is the deep logic of the Rule of Law, and it deserves to be spelled out.

First, legal protections are indivisible. A right that can be suspended for the guilty can be suspended for anyone the authorities call guilty. The presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the requirement of proof — these exist precisely because we do not know, before a fair process, who is guilty.

Every shortcut taken against a person we are sure deserves it becomes a precedent available against a person who does not. History’s show trials, internments, and miscarriages of justice almost always began with defendants nobody wanted to defend.

Second, the alternative to law is not justice but power. Roper imagines that once the laws are cleared away, righteousness will get at the Devil directly. More knows better: what actually fills the space law vacates is whoever happens to be strongest at the moment.

The forest of laws slows everyone down — including the good — but that friction is the price of a landscape in which the weak are not simply at the mercy of the strong. Cut the laws down and you have not liberated justice; you have crowned force.

Third, universality is what gives law its legitimacy. People obey the law, cooperate with courts, pay their taxes, and accept adverse judgments largely because they believe the system will also protect them when their turn comes. A legal system that visibly plays favourites — that gives full protection to the wealthy and connected while offering the poor, the foreign, the accused, or the despised a diminished version — forfeits that consent. Cynicism about the law is corrosive precisely because it is often earned.

The quiet ways the benefit of law is eroded

The dramatic threat — Roper’s axe swinging at the forest — is rare. Erosion is usually quieter, and comes dressed in reasonable clothing.

It appears when legal aid is cut until the right to counsel becomes theoretical for those who cannot pay.

It appears when court delays stretch so long that the process itself becomes the punishment.

It appears in emergency powers that outlive their emergencies, in laws drafted so broadly that officials effectively choose whom to prosecute, in retrospective rules, in public commentary that treats an arrest as a conviction, and in the popular impatience that asks why some obviously guilty person “deserves” a lawyer, a hearing, an appeal.

Each of these, taken alone, can be defended as efficiency, economy, or common sense. Taken together, they are Roper’s project pursued by increments: a flattening of the legal landscape, one tree at a time, always in pursuit of some devil whose wickedness seems to justify the cutting.

The question More would ask of every such measure is the one he asks Roper — when this power, this shortcut, this exception is turned against you or someone you love, what will be left standing to shelter you?

Keeping the forest standing

A society serious about the Rule of Law therefore has to treat the benefit of law as infrastructure, not luxury. That means funding it: courts that can hear cases in reasonable time, legal aid that makes representation real, judiciaries whose independence is protected in structure and not merely in rhetoric.

It means resisting the framing that pits “rights of criminals” against “rights of victims,” when in truth due process is what distinguishes a conviction that vindicates a victim from an act of official vengeance that may have caught the wrong person.

And it means cultivating, in ordinary citizens, the unglamorous conviction More voices: that defending the legal protections of people we detest is not softness but self-preservation.

More himself, of course, was eventually destroyed through the forms of law — convicted on Rich’s perjured testimony. Bolt does not present this as a refutation of More’s principle but as its tragic confirmation: it was the corruption of legal process, the withdrawal of the law’s honest benefit from one man, that made judicial murder possible.

The lesson is not that law failed More, but that men failed the law — and that when they did, no one in England stood safer for it.

The scene endures because its question is never settled. Every generation produces its Richard Riches and its devils, and every generation hears Roper’s voice urging that this time, for this enemy, the laws can be laid flat.

The measure of a society under the Rule of Law is whether, at that moment, it answers as More did: that the benefit of law belongs to all, that it belongs to the worst of us precisely so it will still be there for the best of us, and that a country planted thick with laws is not an obstacle course for justice but the only shelter any of us has when the winds begin to blow.