Some political theoreticians define the law as an instrument of domination of one class over another, also as a mechanism of repression and social control. Insofar as it involves physical restraint, penal sanctions imposed by a magistrate and the use of force by the police, the measures which a government takes to ensure its power and survival against the violent attacks of political offenders and criminals can be defined as institutionalized violence. This form of forcible action, however, is always based on some body of laws and norms, even in a dictatorship such as the Third Reich. Such laws and norms do not necessarily coincide with the universal moral values associated with natural law: in many cases they are only the codification of the interests and values of the ruling classes, but they represent at least an attempt at legal justification of government actions. All forms of political power, when they are stripped down to bare essentials, contain some element of arbitrariness, reflected in their juridical underpinnings. Political violence and the law (i.e., international law) interact to the greatest possible extent in war, which is itself an expression of pure violence, because the belligerents do not recognize the enemy (i.e., one another) as sharing the same juridical, even the same existential community. The 1929 and 1949 Geneva conventions recognized wounded, captured, and shipwrecked enemies as no longer enemies, but, rather as fellow humans in need of help. In general it must be remembered that the type of governmental action referred to as institutionalized violence is structured and aimed at specific, individual targets (i.e., criminal and political offenders) in contrast to criminal and political violence in the streets, which is always chaotic and situational in nature. Thirty-six references are appended.