Function of Law

“A society must remove the retaliatory use of force methodically from the realm of whim. Every aspect of such use must be defined in advance, validated, codified: under what conditions force can be employed, by whom, against whom, in what forms, to what extent. The nonarbitrary use of force requires, in Ayn Rand’s words,

objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob.

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A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

. . . [A government] should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power.”