This article discusses notions of "laws", "Justice" and "the Law" in E. P. Thompson's work. Our goal is to achieve an understanding of how such notions have been articulated and how they connect with ideas of "experience" and "culture". The specific works studied are those published in the book intitled The essencial E. P. Thompson, edited in 2002 by historian Dorothy Thompson. Furthermore, we seek an understanding of the possible political consequences that these notions hold, today, for the thought and action of a democratic Left. We conclude that Thompson's defense of the "domain of the Law" as an unquestionable human conquest further suggests a rethinking of the way in which the critique of liberal democratic regimes is usually carried out, since quite often the critique of capitalism is mistakenly understood as a critique of democracy, as if the two were an inseparable unit. Nonetheless, we should not forget that capitalism only became democratic through a long and hard struggle for rights: civil rights, in the 18th Century, political rights, in the 19th Century and social rights, in the 20th Century. Thus, it was the action and the words of "the underdogs" that not only made liberalism progressively democratic but, on many occasions, threw up barriers to the destructive furor of capitalism.
Laws; Justice; the Law; experience; political culture