The philosophical tradition of natural law (Aquinas, Grotius, Locke) — the claim that human law must conform to a higher moral law discoverable by reason — runs through much political and religious poetry, which appeals to natural or divine law against the injustice of positive law; Kafka's literary vision of the law as an inscrutable, opaque authority that demands compliance without explanation has influenced contemporary poets who write about bureaucratic and institutional power; A poet writing about civil disobedience — Thoreau's, Gandhi's, the Civil Rights movement's — invokes the philosophical distinction between just and unjust law (a distinction central to Augustine and Aquinas) to argue that obedience to some laws is itself a moral violation; Derrida's "Force of Law" distinguishes between law (which can be deconstructed) and justice (which cannot), arguing that the law always falls short of the justice it claims to embody — this philosophical tension between law and justice is a generative source for poetry about legal institutions and their failures; In Blake's prophetic books, the law (embodied in Urizen and his tablets of stone) is a philosophical antagonist — the imposition of rule and limit on human energy and desire — and the poem enacts the liberation from law as a spiritual and political necessity; Legal formalism (the philosophical view that law is a system of rules that can be applied mechanically) is challenged by poems about the human stakes of legal decisions, which insist that every legal case involves particular human beings whose circumstances exceed the abstract categories of the law