  A conception of law as having a moral source, or a source in a system’s institutions, can be independent of a realistic appraisal of law’s ideological function, or the ideological process in which laws are made. Indeed, radical critics of the ‘war on terror’ waged by western governments have pointed to the value of liberal legal ideals such as human rights and the rule of law at the same time as they have noted the ideological purposes to which such ideals are put.  Both positivists and natural lawyers, so long as they do not insist that their conceptions of law are exhaustive of law’s reality, can permit the influence of ideology, even in its more radical interpretations. Law can be ideology as well as other moral or institutional phenomena at the same time; indeed, law will probably not succeed as ideology unless it is multi-dimensional in just this way.