In the Western, the frontier represents not an absence of law but a zone of heightened conflict between radically different, even opposed conceptions of law: between positive law, or the dictates of civil society, on the one hand, and natural law, a higher but unwritten code of moral authority, on the other. This ideological frontier between positive law and natural law is seminal to the Western, where it is patrolled by figures whose position is defined in relation to law; usually the lawman, and his alter ego the outlaw, or occasionally by someone who conflates both roles.
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