A Roscoe Pound soundbite about “law”:
"[L]aw is an attempt to satisfy, to reconcile, to harmonize, to adjust ... overlapping and often conflicting claims and demands, either through securing them directly and immediately, or through securing certain individual interests, or through delimitations or com- promises of individual interests, so as to give effect to the greatest total of interests or to the interests that weigh most in our civiliza- tion, with the least sacrifice of the scheme of interests as a whole."
Roscoe Pound, Survey of Social Interests, 57 HARV. L. REV. 1, 39 (1943).