  This approach is based on the view that, emergencies aside, it is wrong for government to exercise its power to coerce if such an exercise is not allowed by law. Here, the law is meant to work as a constraint on government’s action, and its role as a constraint is claimed to be grounded in reasons of political morality. (Recall that the constraint follows from moral fact, not the logic of institutional action.) If government is to stand behind my request coercively to enforce my demand against you, it must justify its action by appeal to its institutional practice. The explanation of the role of legality in the exercise of coercive power is that government is under a standing obligation always to act in line with an honest conception of justice. It cannot begin to meet this obligation unless it takes what it has said and done on pertinent issues as relevant to what it may do now. Justice is egalitarian in character. The familiar requirement of treating morally like alike would bind government to use force on a given occasion in the way it has used or would use it in any other actual or hypothetical circumstances relevantly similar to the instant one.