Law as a Modern Discipline

What part does law play in the modern disciplinary project of creating human subjects who experience a heightened pull toward both individualism and altruism and who balance between the competing poles with some blend of calculative reason and anti-calculative reason?   As a pre-modern profession, law is not obviously part of the project of creating useful subjectivity in the way that management and applied psychology are.   But law has been usefully modernized.  First, the rights consciousness that is a prominent feature of modern individualism has found its home and its major forum in law, and helps inculcate self-oriented values in lawyers in particular as well as in others.  Given the continued and necessary presence of communitarian elements that have always been present in the discipline, modern law is neither communitarian nor individualist, but rather a combination of the two principles or poles that acts to heighten the intensity of the feelings connected to both sides in those who are trained in the discipline.  Second, calculative utilitarian reason has risen in law as elsewhere from Jeremy Bentham to a present in which Richard Posner and other modern counterparts of Bentham are an important part of the discipline.   Given the continuing and necessary presence of anti-utilitarian, rule-oriented features of law, the result in law as in modernity generally has been a more equal balance between calculative and cultural reason, with the rise of calculation creating useful pressure on cultural reason to pay its way through justifying its practices.