ABSTRACT
The idea of repressive law presumes that any given legal order may be “congealed injustice.” 1 The mere existence of law does not guarantee fairness, much less substantive justice. On the contrary, every legal order has a repressive potential because it is always at some point bound to the status quo and, in offering a mantle of authority, makes power more effective. All this is well understood in general terms, but there has been little effort to explore systematically the distinctive characteristics of repressive law and to do so in a way that accounts for variation.
