| Summary: | Why do we expect law to bring about better and more just societies? Around the world, systems of accountability are weak and dictators find ways to avoid the constraints of both national and international laws. Yet we continue to call for better laws and for aggressors to be tried for war crimes. This article brings a historical approach to this puzzle, considering some of the earliest known laws, from Mesopotamia, Rome, the Hindu and Islamic worlds and China. Drawing analogies with anthropological analysis of ritual, I suggest that such laws may portray an imagined world, one that people feel it worth invoking in the face of threats to the social order, uncontrolled aggression and the abuse of power. The paradox is that we believe in the rule of law and that we insist it should constrain power in practical and effective ways to be worth creating at all.
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