This society has all these lofty meta-norms around equality and justice that are supposed to justify the particular written law - and sovereignty - but as we've seen throughout this county's history, justice has always been at best an afterthought, or something people had to struggle to achieve, whereas the regular function of law, is part of political economy, which is part of an imperial appropriation of the surface of the world, and the subsurface, and everything else for the generation of profit. That's indistinct from law in this conflict between law and justice.

Write Elliot Sperber on the roots of our mass public-health crisis, the revolutionary power of an ancient, forgotten maxim salus populi suprema lex esto and his essay Four crises, one crisis (or the health of the people) for Monthly Review.