Laws

Law in the ordinary sense is defined here as a derivative product. Whichever endogroup has the institutional power to enforce its endoreality writes its laws of endoreality into coercive strictures, so a legal code is a transcription of a group's reality rather than an independent standard. The purpose of all law, Marsh wrote, is to enforce subordination to the laws of endoreality, and the consequences show up in what legal systems reliably do. Guilt attaches to the negative image, accusation against the endo-ideal is criminalized through secrecy provisions and charges such as lese majeste, libel and perversion of justice, and exemption is claimed by those the group myth deems exceptional. Confucius and Plato both held that rules to govern all humanity were not meant to apply to exceptional men, and the pattern persists where states draft international law, enforce it on others and claim exemption for themselves. Against this she sets a different sense of the word, the laws of the framework itself, which are descriptive rather than coercive. Two universal laws to govern life should be considered when developing laws for societies, and they correspond to the second law of thermodynamics and the movement towards greater entropy, the first being that exosocial expansion must not be blocked. The distinction between describing how life works and enforcing how a group has decided it works is the whole difference between the two senses.

Legal positivism holds that law is whatever a recognized authority enacts and separates that question from whether it is just, which shares Marsh's structure while drawing no conclusion from it. Natural law theory insists on a moral criterion. Critical legal studies and Marxist legal theory argue that law encodes the interests of the powerful while presenting itself as neutral, which is the nearest position to hers. Robert Cover wrote on law's dependence on a shared narrative world. Marsh goes further than the critical tradition by making law definitionally a transcription of endoreality rather than a field that happens to be captured, which leaves no version of ordinary law that could be reformed into neutrality.