 In view of the normative function of law in creating and enforcing obligations and rights, it always makes sense to ask whether law is just, and where it is found deficient to demand reform. Legal systems are therefore the kind of thing that is apt for appraisal as just or unjust. This is a significant feature of law. Not all human practices are justice-apt. It makes no sense to ask whether a certain fugue is just or to demand that it become so. The musical standards of fugal excellence are pre-eminently internal—a good fugue is a good example of its genre; it should be melodic, interesting, inventive etc.—and the further we get from these internal standards of excellence the more diverse evaluative judgments about it become. While some formalists flirt with similar ideas about law, this seems inconsistent with law’s place amongst human practices. Even if law has internal standards of merit—virtues uniquely its own that inhere in its law-like character—these cannot preclude or displace its assessment on independent criteria of justice. A fugue may be at its best when it has all the virtues of fugacity; but law is not best when it excels in legality; law must also be just. A society may therefore suffer not only from too little of the rule of law, but also from too much of it. This does not presuppose that justice is the only, or even the first, virtue of a legal system. It means that our concern for its justice as one of its virtues cannot be side lined by any claim of the sort that law’s purpose is to be law, to its most excellent degree. Law stands continuously exposed to demands for justification, and that too shapes its nature and role in our lives and culture.