In the first place, not all human claims and interests are or can be protected by law. It is not the purpose of law to be rigid. However many statutes, for example, are enacted year by year, the interests they are supposed to protect increase too rapidly to be covered by such statutes. Moreover, as in the case with the right of ownership, many powers and privileges are granted, the exact enjoyment or exercise of which no law could either predict or circumscribe. Hence there always remains a residue of interest that is not comprised within the scope of matured legal tradition. But it is just these newer interests for which some persons demand most emphatically the right to be satisfied. We live not in the past, but on the foremost edge of time, and we are prone to demand as much support for our youngest claims as for those which have a thousand years of legal recognition behind them. Now, undoubtedly, many claims are insufficiently recognized by law. When, however, in the pause before this recognition is secured, people begin to claim for such interests a “superior” moral right to be satisfied, and in comparison to that “superior” right assert that legal rights are merely unfounded prejudices, the charge of inconsistency can be leveled directly against them. Ignorance of the function and scope of the law is no excuse for holding it up to ridicule. Indeed, it is not at all certain that the law could include the satisfaction of every human claim and interest whatever without becoming itself destroyed by this inclusion. In the second place, there are some persons in whom the law’s delays, as well as their experience with the _un_evenhandedness of justice, has provoked a deep-seated prejudice against particular lawyers and jurists, which prejudice, by means of the fallacy of composition, they readily transmute into a scorn for whatever is expressly denominated as legal. Under such conditions the penchant for moral rights may be often nothing but the product of a mind that has become malcontent with things as they are; with the result that solace is sought in the fiction of a set of moral rights which are regarded as possessing a “higher” or final authority. From such a person come Examples Nos. 59 and 76, recently cited. Two comments can be made upon such a case as this. The first of these is that it is quite certain that no man who has become so pessimistic will see his way clear to the solution of the problem that has given him so much tragic concern. As Spinoza says, “The will and the intellect are one and the same,” but as Spinoza also hinted, the intellect and the emotions are not. Moreover, such malcontentedness is relatively easy to annul: let anyone who curses the law begin to make use of it to his advantage, and his “suppressed complex,” as the Freudians would say, rapidly evaporates.