Checks & Balances

The utility of transparency

Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free...

Bicameral legislatures

A single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual. Subject to fits of humour, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities of prejudice, and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments. —John Adams....

Dispersal of power

The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and...

Judicial oversight of the executive

Judicial review The rule of law requires that the executive in its coercive action be bound by rules which prescribe not only when and where it may use coercion but also in what manner it may do so. The only way in which this can be ensured is to make all its actions...

Westminster System

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistracy, there can be then no liberty … Again, there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers. Were it joined...

Checks & Balances

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done. —James Madison. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, New York, October 17, 1788. A well devised constitution will recognize that every official has a natural tendency to exceed and abuse his...