Starting six years ago, a global rule of law recession has rippled and raged through communities around the world. Authoritarian trends compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic have eroded government accountability, rolled back human rights, and delayed justice in dozens of countries.
By 2021, the United States was among the countries with the sharpest deterioration in the rule of law. Declines in U.S. rule of law performance were roughly on par with those in Myanmar, Nicaragua, and the Philippines.
Then last fall, the U.S. score on the annual World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index rose for the first time since 2016. The country’s gains across all eight factors that the Index measures made it one of the world’s biggest rule of law improvers in 2022. Suddenly, it seemed imaginable that the United States could bounce back, although there was still a hill to climb.
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