ABSTRACT
How can the same thinker pervasively attack legal argumentation while equally suggesting consistently that the law can stand as a signpost to justice? On the Genealogy of Morals’ second essay famously accomplishes both. Nietzsche there displays his customary dissatisfaction with contemporary modes of legal interpretation — and by contemporary I mean from the Gospel writers to the legal sociologists of the late nineteenth century — while also endorsing law (if properly propounded and interpreted) as the flawed but nonetheless best means to the end of controlling rancorous violence and establishing good relations among equally situated members of a polity.
