Much recent scholarship has been animated by the desire to understand the limits of law and how law figures its own limits. It has charted the gaps, fissures, and incompleteness of legality in a society whose political rhetoric stresses the depth and strength of our commitment to the rule of law. This work is enlivened and enriched when it is rooted in, or informed by, the perspectives of political philosophy.

Karl Llewellyn (1934: 205) was correct in identifying ways philosophy shapes legal action and noting that “[p]hilosophers' writings and law-men's doings meet rarely on the same level of discourse, and part of the game is to find out where they do, where they do not, and – if you can – the why of either.” However, the relevance of philosophical perspectives to law was, and is, broader than Llewellyn acknowledged. His invitation to examine what he variously called “philosophy-in-action” or “implicit philosophy” so as to identify the “implicit” and “unthought” premises of legal action pointed to that broader relevance even if he did not himself pursue it (Llewellyn 1934: 206). In what follows we take up Llewellyn's invitation, using political philosophy to cast new light on the work of one kind of “law man” – prosecutors – and, in so doing, to chart another domain of what Sarat and Hussain (2004: 1311) have called “lawful lawlessness.”