Concluding remarks: Discourse versus strategy

Lawyers love law. It is not hard to see why. Law facilitates the peaceful settlement of conflicting claims – not entirely cost-free, but vastly cheaper than most other ways of battling it out. Law forestalls many conflicts by setting out in advance, in a mutually consistent way, what various agents are required, entitled, permitted, or forbidden to do. By disposing society to punish those who overstep their bounds, law deters conduct likely to entail conflict. Moreover, insofar as it is not merely known but also internalised, law civilises social intercourse by placing illegal conduct outside the realm of options that agents typically consider. By clarifying and policing the limits of each agent’s freedom, law ensures that agents can act with security and confidence within these limits. All these virtues of law are compatible with gross injustice – compatible with systems of laws that recognise, for instance, property in persons (slavery) or an entitlement to rape one’s wife. Gross injustice in the law may balance law’s virtues through the special hideousness of officially sanctioned wrongs. Rape is rendered even more intolerable if it is socially approved as lawful or even comes right after the victim has been turned over, by dutiful enforcers of the law, to her rightful owner or husband.