With four months to go before he becomes president of the new UK Supreme Court, Lord Phillips is managing to dispel the impression that he is merely a pale imitation of the man who would have headed the court if it had been completed in time, the much-admired Lord Bingham.
Both judges have now given lectures on the rule of law - Bingham two-and-a-half years ago and Phillips at the Qatar Law Forum last weekend.
In his Sir David Williams lecture at Cambridge in 2006, Bingham pointed out that parliament had explicitly preserved the rule of law in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 without taking the trouble to define it.
Dismissing the suggestion that it was too well known to need definition, the then senior law lord cited a writer who said that everyone was in favour of the rule of law even though they could not agree on what it meant.
Bingham then rendered all further debate unnecessary by providing his own pithy definition of the core principle: 'that all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly and prospectively promulgated and publicly administered in the courts.'
I don't suppose any of the 450 judges and lawyers from nearly 90 countries who were in Qatar to discuss the global commitment to the rule of law would have been opposed to it, however much they might have argued about its meaning. Some even said the phrase should remain undefined.
Thus Professor Pierre Legrand of the Sorbonne in Paris stressed that the rule of law should not be regarded as a technical framework disseminated by benevolent people who understood the way of the world. If the rule of law was to operate persuasively across cultures and traditions, it had to take account of local circumstances, values and legitimate expectations. 'There is no one-size-fits-all model,' he said, 'and indeed there should not be'.
Phillips agreed that 'the search was not for identical laws or legal procedures'.
But without trying to better his predecessor's carefully drafted rule - or, indeed, Bingham's eight sub-rules - Phillips set out six broad propositions by which adherence to the rule of law was to be judged.
Nothing less than the survival of the world depended on them, he said. Huge international pressures were building up, both environmental and political. There were only two ways in which these tensions would be resolved. 'One is war and the other is law.'
That was how important the rule of law was. 'Without a universal commitment to the ultimate authority of law - law founded on principle and administered through independent, stable and respected judicial systems - the world as we know it is not going to survive,' Phillips said.
Which brings us to Harriet Harman. One of the Phillips principles is that the rule of law requires constant vigilance. 'It is not a luxury item that can be put away in the cellar in times of emergency, to be brought out again when things get better,' he said.
Upholding the rule of law was more important than fighting terrorism, he argued, though nowadays people were more concerned about the global economic crisis.
Phillips thought bankers and other 'fat cats' who had received apparently 'obscene' bonuses should face sanctions if they had breached their legal duties. But not otherwise - 'what is not acceptable is to attempt to punish them by retrospective legislation or by media blackmail'.
Everyone present understood this to be a reference to Harman, who had insisted that the law would be changed to deprive Sir Fred Goodwin of his pension from Royal Bank of Scotland.
Labour's deputy leader said at the beginning of March that Goodwin's contract might be enforceable in a court of law 'but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion; and that is where the government steps in'.
Harman, who practised as a solicitor, is a former solicitor general. All the more reason for her not to have spoken out, Phillips seemed to imply.
'In times of crisis,' Phillips said, 'judges and lawyers have a particularly important role to play in ensuring that popular emotion does not subvert the rule of law.'
He insisted that governments must respect the rule of law both in their own countries and abroad. But though Phillips stressed that responsibility for the rule of law started with our political leaders, he made it clear that he was not referring to MPs' expenses.
His other propositions - equal justice and mutual respect between members of the global legal community - at first appear bland, almost unexceptionable. But it took some courage to refer to the 'evil of gender discrimination' in a stiflingly hot Muslim country where men traditionally wear cool white robes and women, some of them veiled, dress in black. His call for regular conversations between lawyers from countries 'that share borders but do not, perhaps, share amity' was equally pointed.
It was a strong speech to what Phillips rightly said was an 'unprecedented gathering of global leaders in law'. More than half a dozen serving chief justices were on the platform, from countries as far apart as South Africa, New Zealand and India. All of them were there to show respect to their former colleague Lord Woolf, who chaired the conference and who now heads a special court set up in Qatar to decide commercial disputes according to common-law principles.
Phillips told them that 'a world of law may avoid a world at war'. True - but judges have only gavels, not guns.
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