There seems to be wide acceptance of the need to kill bin Laden  despite legitimate anxiety about undermining international rule of law. As Russel Norman and John Pagani recognised yesterday on Q & A, small countries like New Zealand have most to lose if the tender shoots of international law are trampled by martial elephants.

But we cannot have it both ways. If we support procedural law so refined and delicate that it ceases to deliver the protection and  justice that the people demand from their governments, those governments, in democracies at least, will have no alternative but to find ways to deliver extra-judicial justice. They may dress it up. "Shot while trying to escape" is an age old cover for rough justice as well as a common tactic of brutal oppressors.

Now the general applause for killing bin Laden raises the question whether Amnesty and others who rule out the death penalty score an own goal. If a due process penaly can never match the evil, so that the justice scales can never be balanced there will be irresistible pressure for alternatives to evade the law. There is undeniable moral inequality when mass murderers live in comfort long after their terrified victims. Their comfort creates a political inevitability for pre-judicial killings of "necessity".

Live terrorist murderers in custody are also focus points for further murder and hostage taking. By insisting on constipated ICC processes for trials, irrespective of cost and delay even where guilt has been established for all to see, we lawyers will leave leaders with little alternative but to connive at real-politik pre-judicial killings and disappearances.

I predict that we will soon see this balance reasserting itself in another area. The  world's navies have been emasculated by their on-board lawyers (or those over-ruling the commanders on the spot from safe offices far away) in the fight against Somali pirates. Soon we will see shipowners engaging genuine private defenders. They'll sink pirate attackers and leave them to drown. The defenders will then melt away.

There will be widespread official connivance to allow the appearance of continuing observance of the foolish international law and conventions that have created the opportunity for the pirates.

The hand-wringing will resume. Those who've created the irreconcilable tension will never admit that their disdain for the morality of ordinary citizens is ultimately responsible for corroding and causing the loss of the rule of law they desperately desire.

The same dynamic drives many domestic law changes that are so upsetting our legal establishment. People of goodwill are right to be concerned about the erosion of procedural rights – because they are going instead of the sacred cows that create the judicial injustice.

 The solutions are in the hands of the legal establishment but they will never accept that.