In 1924 Arthur Keith wrote that ‘Throughout the Empire the system of government is distinguished by the predominance of the rule of law’ (Keith 1924: 136). Starting here provides a framework for understanding: South Africa was a part of the British Empire which was both an international political and constitutional system, as well as both a world-wide legal system and a dominant and coherent legal culture. In using the phrase ‘the rule of law’ Keith was invoking Dicey's formulation which exercised a complete dominance over the discourse of public law in this area. It meant, according to Dicey, the ‘absolute supremacy’ of ‘regular law’, as opposed to ‘arbitrary power’ and even excluded ‘wide discretionary authority’ on the part of government. It meant the ‘equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary courts’. And it meant that the principles of the common law, not a constitution, were the source of individual rights (Dicey [1885] 1959: 183–202). South African constitutional and administrative law developed within these contexts, and was powerfully influenced and constrained by them. Innes, as South Africa's Chief Justice, proclaimed that ‘one of the features of the English Constitution, a feature re-produced in the self-governing Dominions, is the absolute supremacy of the law’ (Krohn v Minister of Defence 1915 AD 191 at 196).