A legal philosopher listed eight ways a king can fail to make real law

Lon Fuller imagined an inept king, Rex, who tries to rule by law and fails in eight distinct ways: no rules at all, secret rules, retroactive rules, unintelligible rules, contradictory rules, rules impossible to obey, rules that change too often, and rules not actually followed by the rulers. Fuller argued a system that fails badly enough on these counts isn't really 'law' at all, whatever it calls itself.

— Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law — 1964
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