In the case of judicial decisions based on reasons of justice and equity, it must be taken into account that, although the substantive law in these cases is set aside, the other procedures informed by the principles of due process are respected: the law to be heard, to offer evidence and supervise its production and to access an impartial tribunal, among others. Likewise, so that the judicial resolution based on equity is not arbitrary, it must also configure a judicial precedent and it must not be contradictory with other judicial precedents, since, if the courts depart from the substantive law in order to attend to the special circumstances of the case, they should resolve in the same way before similar cases in which the same circumstances that motivated a resolution for equity have been or were presented.

With respect to the cases in which the law itself grants a public administration official a certain scope of discretion on a given matter, it should be noted that said powers do not violate higher-ranking norms, such as constitutional rights and guarantees. A public official has an indisputable margin of discretion to decide what color to paint the building of the body under his direction and, if he does it with too strident color, in any case he will incur not a legal responsibility but another of strict order. political, according to which a higher-ranking official shall proceed to exercise his respective discretionary powers to remove him from his functions.

Outside of these specific cases, it is expected that in the Rule of Law system all decisions, both governmental and judicial, will be taken based on rules that are intended to limit the arbitrariness of those. This limitation allows individuals to conform their expectations regarding the expected behavior of other individuals and of the powers of the state themselves and, in such a way, to devise their life plan and coordinate it with the plans of their fellow human beings. Such a legal system demarcates the spheres of individual autonomy, within which each person should not be accountable to anyone, except to their conscience, and provides for a conflict resolution system for the eventuality that a dispute arises between individuals or between individuals. and the state. Such controversy does not necessarily have to consist of a violation of the norm, but it can also come from an interpretative disagreement between the parties who are convinced that they are acting according to the law but who, nevertheless, reach conflicting decisions.

In such a system of dispute resolution, based on legal norms known to all, be they written or customary, arbitrariness is reduced to cases of judicial error – generating natural obligations, that is, of mere moral compliance. Consequently, a system of administrative and judicial decisions based on rules contributes to materializing the ideal of respect for individual freedom, understood as the absence of arbitrary coercion.

Therefore, it is understood how the low law enforcement by the public powers, which generates incentives for systematic legal non-compliance by individuals and, likewise, grants a wide margin of discretion to those public powers to carry out a whimsical law enforcement, implies a real change of political regime.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 11 in a 12-part essay; you can read Part 10 here or read the essay in its entirety here.]