The axiom “where there is society, there is Law” is only true if Law is understood not as a set of legal norms, but as the treatment of conflicts. There is no society without conflict, and no society without some form of conflict treatment. The Stele of Hammurabi, for example, is not a code of abstract rules but a record of specific disputes resolved by the king, immortalized alongside his victories. Placing conflict at the center resolves difficulties in the theory of customary law. Among peoples without writing, no oral legal norms existed; what occurred was the pragmatic treatment of disputes by shamans, elders, or others. Only with positivization did judges begin to speak of “customary law,” creating it through decisions that filled gaps in the legal order. Institutionalism, rooted in Weber and Luhmann, is equally implausible. Human societies have never been successfully reorganized by rational planning, from Plato’s Republic to the Soviet experiment. The Order-by-Law theory—defining Law as norms that rationally mold society—rests on an illusion of human capacity for rational reorganization. Social cohesion arises instead from shared values shaped by emotion, not reason. Law does not create morality; it reifies values already dominant within the collective.