4 ideas
The 'rule of law' often functions as a rhetorical ideal invoked to legitimize power rather than a consistent reality binding everyone equally. In practice, sovereigns, elites, and the state itself operate as exceptions—claiming immunity while enforcing the law's constraints on the governed.
When a group is subject to laws and taxes but excluded from the political process that creates them, obligation becomes a form of domination rather than membership. The Smith sisters' protest—being taxed as women while barred from the vote governing that tax—exposes the illegitimacy of laws imposed on those denied a hand in making them.
In stateless or weak-state societies, retaliatory violence functions as a coherent legal order: the Albanian Law of Blood codified who may kill whom, when, and how honor is settled. This shows that 'law' need not require courts or states—it can operate through binding customary rules of vengeance and restitution.
The legitimacy of a verdict depends on whether the jury genuinely shares the defendant's social position and experience, not merely on procedural fairness. Lucy Stone's demand to be tried by fewer men reveals that 'a jury of one's peers' is meaningless if the peer group is defined to exclude people like the accused.