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Wherever people are present and acting together, we can find in the social glue between them the process we call law. It is not a written list of rules, the collected judgments of courts, or the decrees of a monarch. These things are the tools of law and the evidence of its practice, not law itself. Law is a process, the human-willed system of cause and effect that governs the evolution of the togetherness of those who choose to act together. It is a kind of inevitable source code on which a society runs, its output read and acted upon to yield one physical moment and then the next. 1 Always being rewritten and contested, this intellectual wraith that is the law, this thing that exists only in our minds and is given form only by our actions and communications, this is the object of our study.Is the process of law as unpredictable and varied as the distinct and random neuronal firings of peoples separated by oceans and millennia? Are there, instead, basic principles or a logic of law that is invariant among its instances? The word 'law' suggests its practice may be thought to have at least some kinship with the natural laws of our universe. Those 'laws' are also abstract understandings of the connections between causes and effects. Indeed, various legal philosophies have taken this similarity nearly to the point of identity. 2 While most naturally associated with formalists, 3 even the archetypal legal realist Arthur Corbin noted that both 'rules of physics and rules of law … enable us to predict physical consequences and to regulate our actions accordingly.' 4 Taken to the extreme, the laws of the legal world just involve distinctive kinds of physical events and objects, in the same way that chemistry, biology, and ecology are all, ultimately, physics but have developed special methods, conclusions, and approximations concerning the complex physical processes within their domains.