Law and Class The selections in this chapter address the problem of the historical specificity of law as a form of social regulation. Why does law appear so conducive to the rule of capital? Readers should be aware that this basic question leads quickly to a region that until recently was theorized as ‘ reform or revolution?’ Some writers have suggested that by its very nature law is an inherently bourgeois form of social regulation. If …showed first 75 words of 1194 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1194 total…a higher and more acutely contradictory level of development.’ Against Thompson he warns that although trial by jury, for example, is better than trial by ordeal, this improvement must not prevent us from seeing its bourgeois characteristics and hence its limitations. The working class movement, he concludes, must strive not to uphold the unattainable ideas of the rule of law, but to transcend them in ways that challenge the dominance of capitalist social relations themselves.