Termination I

If one recalls that a feature of legal processes often seems to be the interminable number of appeals against verdicts that carry on the contest to “higher” and “higher” courts, it is reasonable to ask whether conflicts within rules ever genuinely come to an end. The question is also pertinent if one also recalls that many conflicts without any rules at all seem to start up again, many generations after a previous spasm of violence.1 Old rivalries and enmities seem to be played out by entirely new generations of adversaries, frequently with even greater vehemence and venom than the last time round. In the 1990s, for example, the War of Yugoslav Disintegration seemed simply to be playing out once again inter-ethnic hostilities and violence that had occurred in that part of the Balkans in the 1940s, while the latter were symptoms of long fought-out historic rivalries between Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenians, Muslim Bosniacs and Kosovars.2