Narrow adherence to textual sources and the literal approach, have led formal-legalists to miss, willfully ignore, or endorse the paradigm's strategic association with state power, evolving since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Formal-legalism has lent itself amenable to the interests of the state and to the variable construction of the meaning of the law devoid of original spirit and universality but conforming with the specific interests of the state or, for that matter, the prevailing American empire, both spatially and temporally. Accounting for this anomaly, the historical materialist perspective is considered, with appropriate historical and contemporary illustrations, as a relevant explanatory alternative to the now-obsolescent formal-legalist paradigm. With the assumption that, indeed, economic and material considerations such as those demanded by the dominant class elements within the state underlie the rationale for the state, formal-legalism has evolved from one that initially provided a presumed objective view of society to one that has subjectively become an essential part of the cultural suprastructure that allows these elements to command the state as a principal tool for labor- and value-extraction during what is popularly known as contemporary neoliberal globalization.