Servi legum sumus, or We Are Slaves of the Law

In the discussion on the procedure for determining the risk of violating the rule of law under Article 7 (1) in connection with Article 2 TEU, it is sometimes alleged that it is difficult clearly to determine the content of the term “rule of law”. Thus, according to some, the whole procedure suffers from the flaw of arbitrary assessment, since allegedly there is no precisely defined standard of assessment. The main purpose of this article is to show that despite everything we are able to reconstruct the hard core of the rule of law, because its concept is deeply rooted in the long history of European legal culture. The author shows it on the example of Cicero’s political philosophy, especially on one sentence from his famous Oratio pro Cluentio: “The law has its ministers in our magistrates, its interpreters in our jurors; it makes servants of us all only to set us free”.