Wargusy extra sermonem, útlah: the outlaw

Every type of community has mechanisms of exclusion which stop short of actually killing the person to whom they are applied. Scholars who start from this simple premise and fail to explore the matter further tend to lump together the most disparate legal phenomena, discerning continuities and similarities rather than distinctions and differences. The comparative analysis in the present book has constantly kept to an intermediate level of abstraction, to principia: close to regulae and supported by them, but also close to ethical and political approaches and validated by them. In this concluding chapter I shall take the method to its limits, examining themes of such central importance as to test the validity of the method itself.

It is precisely these centred themes which tend to foster intellectual laziness; theories that have never been thoroughly proved are often assumed to be true merely because they are generally endorsed. Consuetudo docendi smothers quaestio veritatis.

Caesar tells of the punishment meted out by the Druids of Gaul to people who failed to comply with their decisions.