Leftists are not the biggest fans of law and the courts. Ask a socialist in the United States what they think of the Supreme Court, and you’re likely to get a middle finger or an essay-long speech about how the robed nine have retrenched the power of capital and backstopped oppression.

It should come as no surprise, then, that many socialists have dreamed of a world without a legal system. Belying their reputation as statists, Marx and Engels wrote of the “withering away” of the state. Since the state and statist law were “nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests,” it would disappear with the advent of a classless society. “The state is not ‘abolished,’” Engels wrote at one point, “it withers away.”

How the state would “wither away,” however, and what would supplant it were never well defined — Engels hypothesized that “the government of persons [would be] replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.” But what about the conflicts that, classless society or not, would endure and need to be adjudicated? Some Marxists insisted that under socialism a new type of person would emerge, liberated from the egoism of competitive capitalist society. No need for the law. Others argued that socialism would produce such a superabundance of goods that the material bases of crime would disappear along with the symptoms.