This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably easy for creatures with brains like ours to leap over the gap, to close the rift between abstractions and their embodiments, but there is an inevitable fissure between abstract and concrete in the social contract of laws. My discussion triangulates among evidence from Shakespeare’s revenge play, Hamlet, from early modern discussion about equity law, and from relevant cognitive theory.