The law's curse is that it sees itself sitting outside the social realm, as if the law were commanding how people ought to act, much like a traffic cop or senior officer. It pretends to reform society from the outside, channeling behavior by creating or recognizing rights and responsibilities from abstract principles or generalized rules that seem to transcend human interaction. In fact, the law operates within the social realm, moving to influence how people ought to make decisions by recognizing how people do make decisions, endorsing those methods of making decisions that seem to be good for the community and gently inducing people to change those that do not.

Thus, a major theme of this book is a plea to understand private law in a new way – as the institution society has created to work within society by recognizing and endorsing forms of interpersonal decision making that appear to be good for the community and correcting those that do not. This theme suggests that we need a new way of understanding the concept of law – a recognition that private law embodies a methodology of resolving disputes by understanding how people ought to think about their relationships with other members of the community. This, in turn, requires that we understand law as a method of analyzing human decision making and behavior when humans interact, and it implies that the goal of the law is to recognize an assignment of rights and responsibilities that makes each person better off by requiring an actor to sometimes sacrifice the actor's individual interests for the sake of others so that others will sometime sacrifice their interests for the actor.