  Lon Fuller 1969, acknowledging Aquinas’ lead in this discussion of formal and procedural aspects of legal system, pulls together Aquinas’ scattered and fragmentary remarks about them into an orderly list of eight elements of the rule of law, that is of la primauté du droit, the legal system of a Rechtsstaat. He shows that these hang together as a set of desiderata (or requirements) because they are implications or specifications of the aspiration and duty to treat people as presumptively entitled—as a matter of fairness and justice—to be ruled as free persons, fundamentally the equals of their rulers, not puppets or pawns to be managed and kept in order by manipulation, uncertainty, fear, etc. The normal result of such fairness in the procedures of making and maintaining the law will be to strengthen the law’s efficacy, too. Unfortunately, the surface of Fuller’s text gives more prominence to effectiveness than to fairness, and many critics (e.g., Hart, Dworkin), overlooking the moral connotations of Fuller’s allusions to reciprocity between rulers and ruled, thought his book’s title, The Morality of Law, a misnomer. This thesis has been elaborated more carefully and on a different basis by Raz 1979 and Kramer 2004a and 2004b: although the rule of law (and compliance with it) can be morally important and even a moral virtue (because normally necessary for fully just government in a just society, and especially for alleviating dangers that arise from the existence of political authority, and of law itself), it is nonetheless in itself morally neutral since (in states which employ the forms of law) it will normally be needed even by deeply unjust rulers for advancing their immoral purposes. It is like a sharp knife, whose sharpness makes it apt for life-saving surgery but equally for stealthy callous murders (Raz 1979, 224–6).