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Pray look better, Sir, quoth Sancho; those things yonder are no Giants, but Windmills .... The career of an associate in a large law firm has been portrayed in stark Darwinian terms: Only the fittest survive the "tournament" that is established by the firm's partners. Such is the tale told by Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay in Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm. This "tournament theory" explanation for the structure of large law firms has been widely adopted, and has received surprisingly little criticism.' 1. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA 44 (Peter Motteux trans.. revised by John Ozell, 1950) (1605). The Spanish text reads: Mire vuestra merced-respondi6 Sancho-quc aquellos que allf se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento... .-I MIGUEL DE CERVANTES.

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We argue that for theorists with a post-institutional conception of property, e.g., Rawlsians, there is no principled reason to limit the domain of distributive justice to tax and transfer-both tax policy and the rules of the private law are constructed in service to distributive aims. Such theorists cannot maintain a commitment to a normative conception of private law independent of their overarching distributive principles. In contrast, theorists with a pre-institutional conception of property can derive the private law from sectors of morality independent of distributive justice. Nevertheless, we argue, this does not entail that the private law, for pre-institutional theorists, must be sanitized of equity-oriented values. Non-libertarian pre-institutional theorists holding principled commitments to equity-oriented values are free to invoke either tax and transfer or the rules of the private law to attain them.

O NCE upon a time, all the mice met together in council, to discuss the best means of securing themselves against the attacks of the cat. After several suggestions had been debated, [several mice] of some standing and experience got up and said, "I think [we] have hit upon a plan which will ensure our safety in the future, provided you approve and carry it out. It is that we should fasten a bell around the neck of. .. the cat, which will, by its tinkling, warn us of her approach." This proposal was warmly applauded, and it had been decided to adopt it, when [two small mice] got [up] and said, "[We] agree with you all that the plan before us is an admirable one: but may [we] ask [how are we] going to bell the cat?" Moral: It is easy to propose impossible remedies.