
The modern legal system is an extraordinary conceptual achievement. It is a structure of rules, categories, doctrines, and precedents constructed to generate predictability, stability, and a baseline of safety within which citizens may pursue liberty and happiness. Without law’s conceptual architecture—contract, tort, crime, property, due process—social life would regress toward the unmediated assertion of power, greed, and instinctual drive. Law disciplines impulse through abstraction. Yet the very cognitive capacities that make the legal system possible



