A specter of disunity haunts the common law, threatening to throw property, contract, tort, and penal law into a crisis, where competing paradigms stand intransigently opposed, undermining any claims of coherence and giving sober proof that legality is a battleground of equally unjustifiable ideologies where only force wins out at the end. The impending crisis pits advocates of liberalism, affirming the primacy of the right over the good, against communitarians, upholding the priority of commonly shared ends embodied in an historically given community. Yet although the conflict parallels what many take to be the exhaustive options of ethical thought, the difficulty extends beyond theoretical dispute into the actual practice of common law, where at every turn, tendencies promoting welfare clash with tendencies upholding the formal right of ownership. In face of such division in both theory and practice, the dangers of idealism seem hardly surmountable by fidelity to law or by reflective equilibrium, for if disunity pervades legal thought and convention, neither appeal to the given can locate a coherent kernel in the conflicted shell.