AbstractThe prevalent approach to the concept of the rule of law among legal theorists puts attributes first, assigning certain features of laws and sometimes legal systems as rule-of-law virtues. Inquiring at a more basic level, this paper advances a novel, structuralist view of the rule of law. While honoring theoretical constraints that guard against diluting the rule-of-law concept too thinly as a remedy for myriad societal ills, this approach shows that the concept implicates inequalities sustained by a society’s social, economic, and political structures. This is accomplished by demonstrating that the rule-of-law project holds a structural position in the collective normative discourse as a vehicle by which people morally evaluate the interplay between the actual capabilities of individuals and groups to participate in law, and the legal system’s treatment of those individuals and groups.Law’s procedural outputs may formally provide the public with access to the legal system, but the rule-of-law project goes to the actual capabilities of the people to access the system in reality, to have a fair opportunity to participate in the inputs into the system, and to have that participation impartially adjudicated. Conditions impacting a diversity of stakeholders – and particularly the most disadvantaged within the population – perturb the virtues typically associated with the rule-of-law ideal when those conditions, and the power exercised to maintain them, impair capabilities for fair, dignified, and equal access to legal processes.Understanding the rule of law in structuralist terms, as an informal moral operator, (1) makes sense of the schism we normally accept between the concepts of law and the rule of law, (2) reorients the source of rule-of-law thinking from theorists bent on fixing a conceptual definition to communities engaged in first-order interactions with the legal system, (3) helps explain why citizens come not only to expect law to constrain official coercive powers but also to demand that law promote their actual capabilities to participate in the legal system on an egalitarian and dignitarian footing, and hence (4) implicates a critique of conditions of political and material inequalities that cannot but impair the healthy functioning of the rule-of-law project.

中文翻译：

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法治的结构主义概念

摘要 法律理论家对法治概念的普遍看法将属性放在首位，将法律的某些特征，有时甚至是法律制度的某些特征，作为法治美德。本文从更基础的层面进行探究，提出了一种新颖的、结构主义的法治观。在尊重防止过度淡化法治概念作为对无数社会弊病的补救措施的理论约束的同时，这种方法表明，该概念暗示了社会、经济和政治结构所维持的不平等。这是通过证明法治项目在集体规范话语中作为一种工具在道德上评估个人和群体参与法律的实际能力之间的相互作用的工具而具有结构性地位来实现的，法律的程序性产出可能会正式地为公众提供进入法律制度的途径，但法治项目是指人民在现实中进入制度的实际能力，有公平的机会参与系统的输入，并得到公正的裁决。当这些条件以及为维持这些条件而行使的权力削弱了实现公平、有尊严和平等的能力时，影响各种利益相关者——尤其是人口中最弱势群体——的条件会扰乱通常与法治理想相关的美德进入法律程序。从结构主义的角度理解法治，作为非正式的道德操盘手，