 Language facilitates the making of far more articulate legal norms. When the appeal court in Garner v Burr sent the matter back to the magistrate with instructions to convict, suppose that the magistrate wrote ‘fine: five shillings’ on the court docket. If the justice was authorised to impose such a fine, and writing those words on the docket was a lawful way of exercising that legal power, then how should we understand the contribution to the law of the act of the magistrate? That contribution would, in English law, be just what the magistrate indicated by using the words: that Mr Burr was thereby fined five shillings. A court bailiff would be treated by English law as being authorised to collect five shillings, and not more. The law’s good reasons for such a way of proceeding are very evident: after Mr Burr’s presumably fair hearings in the magistrate’s court and the appeal court, when a magistrate (in the exercise of a jurisdiction on behalf of a court) wrote those words on the docket, the best way to proceed is for the bailiff to treat the judgment of the court as a fait accompli. Suppose, instead, that the bailiff treated the magistrate’s decision as one weighty consideration among others in the overall calculation concerning how much property to seize from Mr Burr. The loss of finality would be a setback for the rule of law. The resulting discretionary power of bailiffs would likewise be a setback for the rule of law. And the shift of decision making power from the magistrates (subject to the appeal court’s oversight) to a bailiff would be a setback for regulatory justice because of the loss of just and expert decision making as to the rights and the liabilities of the parties to a dispute.