Economist Charles Goodhart was considering how to measure the money supply when he said something that has passed into lore through the words of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure.”1 Goodhart’s law identifies a certain persistent problem in designing indicators. When a particular measure is known to those who are being measured and it is within their power to alter its value, they often will try to do so, thus ruining the usefulness of the measure.
The rule of law is a loaded concept. It is frequently invoked as a social ideal, but no one appears to know exactly what it means. The thinnest of definitions views the rule of law as merely a set of process criteria that an enactment must meet to properly be deemed “law.”1 Broader understandings maintain that the rule of law engenders a set of thicker normative commitments that include respect for fundamental rights and the axiom that “no one is above the law.”2
Financial crises teach a recurring lesson that markets have proven slow to internalize: the signals investors rely on to price risk may not only be imperfect but also systematically wrong, in predictable directions, and for extended periods of time. The European sovereign debt crisis of 2010–2012, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, and the Mexican peso crisis before it followed a recognizable pattern.1 Sudden reassessment of sovereign risk, rapid capital flight, and contagion that spread well beyond its original source followed a long period of apparent stability, during which capital flowed freely, yields converged, and external assessments of creditworthiness remained favorable. In the European case, investors who had poured money into Greek and Italian sovereign debt for years on the strength of favorable ratings and the implicit legitimacy of eurozone membership were caught flat-footed because the signals they relied upon had systematically understated the accumulating risk.2 When Greece’s true fiscal position was disclosed, capital fled not only Greece but the neighborhood. Portugal and Spain faced crisis conditions driven by contagion from a signal failure they had not caused.3
In 2011, I published an article called Pitfalls of Measuring the Rule of Law, which wrestled with some of the conceptual and measurement challenges involved in the project.1 The rule of law, I noted, was a central political ideal that crossed political systems, and even dictatorships claimed to uphold it; like democracy itself, there is normative agreement on its desirability even if the underlying conceptualizations of what the rule of law requires are incompatible. This leads to demand for concrete, tractable cross-national measures, which is a deeply fraught enterprise because analysts often ignore basic social science standards of conceptualization and measurement. With Mila Versteeg, I have occasionally returned to this issue.2 In this short update, I review developments since then and argue that, while the rule of law remains an essentially contested concept, concrete measures have not advanced much. The revolution in large language models (LLMs) offers promise, but also new pitfalls, mainly in reifying the relatively poor measures that already exist.
When writing the Ecuadorian Constitution, the drafters made a remarkable choice. They defined Ecuador as a state committed to the “Rule of Rights” instead of the “Rule of Law.” To implement this idea, the drafters wrote the world’s most comprehensive bill of rights.1 Among other things, it protects the rights of lactating mothers, includes a right to locally produced nutritious food, and bestows rights directly upon mother nature (pacha mama), thus allowing constitutional rights claims to be filed on behalf of natural objects, like trees or rivers.2 Overall, the 2008 Constitution devotes no fewer than 73 articles and 10,417 words to constitutional rights, causing some commentators to describe it as “the most progressive constitution in the world.”3 For comparison, the entire U.S. Constitution is 7,591 words long.
