The Duties of a Citizen - On democracy, the rule of law, and the work of self-government

By Chief Justice P. Scott Neville, Jr.

"As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end. Democracy is a high privilege, but it is also a heavy responsibility…"

- Governor Adlai E. Stevenson II

More than seventy years ago, Governor Adlai Stevenson described the American citizen in five paired phrases. The citizen, he said, is the ruler and the ruled, the law-giver and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end. Democracy, he reminded us, is a high privilege and a heavy responsibility. Those words endure because they describe not an ideal, but a structure of duty. They tell us who we are in a free society, and what is asked of us in return.

Begin with a paradox. In a democracy, the citizen is both ruler and ruled. For most of human history, the people who made the rules were not the people who lived under them. Kings ruled; subjects obeyed. Our system reversed that order. The authority of government flows from the consent of the governed. We elect our representatives, we send them to our capitals to act in our name, and we live under the laws they pass. The duty that follows is participation. To vote, to be informed, to attend to public affairs. When citizens disengage, others fill the void, and the government we receive is no longer the government we chose.

The second pairing reaches the heart of our legal order. We are the law-givers and the law-abiding. The law in a democracy is not imposed from above; it is written by the people, through their elected representatives, under a constitution the people themselves ratified. But the writing is only half of it. Once the law is written, we are bound to follow it - all of us, without exception. This is the rule of law: the principle that no person stands above the law and no person stands beneath it. The wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the unknown, the citizen and the public official are equal before it. When that principle holds, freedom is possible. When it breaks down, freedom does not last. The rule of law also requires that we accept outcomes that disappoint us, and that we change the law through the lawful means our system provides - by debate, by election, by amendment - not by force or by abandoning the institutions that hold us together.

The third pairing is the most profound. The citizen, Stevenson said, is the beginning and the end. Every law begins with a citizen who voted, organized, served on a jury, or signed a petition; every law ends with a citizen whose rights are protected and whose community is made more just. The citizen is the source, and the citizen is the purpose. Our courts are not ornaments; they exist to do justice for the people who come before them. Our constitutions, federal and state, were written in the name of the people. Every public servant - judge, legislator, executive officer - holds office in trust. When we forget that the citizen is both beginning and end, our institutions drift. When we remember it, they can be renewed.

Stevenson then turned from structure to spirit. Democracy, he said, is a high privilege. Across the long span of human history, self-government has been the exception, not the rule. Many generations lived and died without ever casting a free vote, speaking openly against their leaders, or standing equal before a court of law. To be a citizen in a free society is to have inherited something rare - and something that was paid for. Paid for by those who debated and drafted our founding documents, by those who fought to extend equal citizenship to people once excluded from it, and by jurists and ordinary citizens who insisted that the words on the page mean what they say. A privilege of this kind is not a possession to be held, but a trust to be carried.

And the carrying is heavy. Self-government asks us to be informed when it would be simpler not to be, to listen to people we disagree with, to respect institutions even when their decisions go against us, and to defend rights for others that we hope will be defended for ourselves. The weight falls on every citizen, but in particular ways on those who serve: on the lawyer, who is an officer of the court before anything else; on the judge, who must rule without fear or favor; on the public official, who holds power that is not his own; and on the citizen who reports for jury duty, who teaches the next generation, and who shows up at the polling place. Each is a thread. Together, they are the fabric of a free society.

Stevenson gave us five descriptions of one person carrying a high privilege and a heavy responsibility. That person is the citizen. That person is each of us. The privilege is real, and so is the weight - but the weight is not ours to carry alone. We carry it together, with the institutions our forebears built and the neighbors who stand alongside us. That is the work of citizenship. It is the work of a lifetime. And it is the work that makes a free people free.