Can one even imagine law without leadership? Walk inside a county courthouse anywhere in the country, and you will find more than jurors waiting to be empaneled or trial counsel holding juries rapt at attention. Down the hall, past judges adjudicating felony trials or contentious family disputes, is a presiding judge—the local trial court’s leader, who may be called on to decide which judge is assigned to the family law division, which judge moves to a felony courtroom, and whether it is feasible for a judge who previously ruled on a suppression motion to adjudicate a subsequent one if the case is dismissed and then refiled.1 Across town, judges reviewing the trial court decision on an appellate panel lead by writing path-breaking opinions that persuade jurists on the other side of a continent or by finding principled reasons to protect the trial court’s discretion. Then there are the law schools these judges attended: Do they warmly welcome new students or run themselves smoothly without deans? No more so than any agency entrusted with legal power—under local, tribal, state, federal, or international law—runs itself. Even those law-related organizations replete with audacity struggle on their best days to eschew the familiar features of bureaucratic authority allocating power to chief judges, administrators, commissioners, secretaries, or other leaders in favor of the alluring—but consistently elusive—ideal of pure democracy, pure technocracy, or pure anything.