When modern people living in democracies think about law, they tend to think about legal institutions. Law, then, would be rules passed by a legislature, enforced by police, and adjudicated by courts—basically, a set of rules backed by a threat of violence. There’s nothing very complicated about that, no matter how complex it might be to keep such a large system of enforcement running. And so we don’t think much about it.

But the above definition, while accurate, is not thorough. After all, no democracy could survive for long if a majority of its people did not find the laws reasonable enough to follow. Law that succeeds only by means of force is what gets called tyranny or worse, right? Such a law also wouldn’t hold out much hope for justice, or even for civil relations among neighbors. So there is more to law than the above definition allows: Law is also how we live together; it is sometimes a reflection of a society’s values; other times it is simply a way of ordering relationships between people by means of contracts, traffic laws, and rules for when you may be compensated for harms. Law also bears the weight of our aspirations toward greater justice. Basically, law has got a lot on its plate. You might think it is too busy for you. But if you take the time to question it, it will speak back to you, and you may be surprised by the answers.

It is even important that you speak to law, because a danger lurks in the lack of thoroughness of what passes for the everyday definition of law. It is the danger that we will not know—because we do not even speak about—what justice is, and what it requires. And then law loses its connection to justice. Marianne Constable, a legal philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law, and Knowledge, takes up the question of the relationship of speech and silence to law, and what that has to do with justice, in some surprising ways in her work. Plus, her name is Constable!

—Jill Stauffer

I. “WHEN YOU DO SPEAK, THE ISSUE IS NEVER JUST WHAT TO SAY BUT ALSO ALWAYS HOW YOU WILL SAY IT.”

THE BELIEVER: In your book Just Silences you write, “One is perhaps never more bound to one’s law than when one is not consciously reflecting on one’s obedience to it.” How so?

MARIANNE CONSTABLE: I meant this as analogous to speaking. When one speaks one’s own...