What does law do for us? What is it supposed to do for us? We might think its main job is to decide conflict and make proclamations of right and wrong, and then maybe help us order our personal lives according to civil procedures such as marriage and will-making. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that law’s purpose is not so easy to pin down, and points out that theories of law are conspicuous in their collective inability to tell us what law is, and what it, definitively, is for.

Fitzpatrick, philosopher of law and author of The Mythology of Modern Law (Routledge, 1992) and Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001) alongside countless articles and edited collections, prompts us to ask why, for instance, Nelson Mandela could despair of law under apartheid and yet view it as perhaps the only chance a black South African had to see justice done. In turn, how can the law giving Native Americans certain rights be the same as the law that so oppresses them? How—philosophically and factually—can law be the agent of so much justice and injustice at the same time? That and related questions are the subject of this interview.

Fitzpatrick is Anniversary Professor of Law at the Birkbeck School of Law in the University of London, U.K. He has also taught at universities in continental Europe, North America, and Papua New Guinea.

—Jill Stauffer

I. LAW IS A MYTHOLOGY

THE BELIEVER: What would be the best place to begin, if we were to discuss why academic writing about law and legal philosophy matters to people who don’t want to spend all their time studying law’s history and intricacies?

PETER FITZPATRICK: The weariness of it all! And indeed so much time has been spent studying law’s history and intricacies. But to what effect? Surely we could expect that after the numberless efforts to tell us what law is, there would be some generally accepted outcome. Yet there isn’t. So one unpromising response to the question of why academic writing about law and legal philosophy matters to the nonspecialist is that it has failed to tell us what law is. But, I should quickly add, this is an important and a productive failure. Admittedly, such a failure should seem strange to us moderns, for does not law provide us with some certainty in an uncertain world? This to me looks like a good place to begin—with our reliance on something we do not seem able to know.

BLVR: You have said that there is a “mythology of modern law.” What does that mean?

PF: This is another good place to begin, to begin with a beginning. My...