ABSTRACT
Law infuses American social life and appears in its political language. This chapter discusses three forms of law in society: "right," "rage," and "remedy." Rights provide us with a paradigm from which to consider the presence of legal form in political discourse, which is itself not legal in the positive sense— that is, hot a command of the sovereign. The constitutive character of legal practices alludes to something more than the reception of law words from on high. The Pound Conference in 1976, assembled the characteristic mix of judges, lawyers, and law school academics who have carried forward the ideology of remedy. "Rage," as an ideological form evident in the movement against violent pornography, focuses on the same instruments of government appealed to by gay activists—the courts, the judges, and the doctrines of law, but it identifies them with oppression rather than protection.
