Cover’s focus was criminal law but the point generalizes. Law expresses, encodes, and distributes state power, and state power includes (though is not limited to) violence. The *intended* effect of the immunity decision is to redistribute control over violence—away from Congress, to the President.
We shouldn’t think of law as always or even mostly a limitation on violence. At its best it is some violence for the sake of ultimately less violence. It always has a repressive edge. Quite often it is not at its best.
