The right against crime in the form of revenge (§ 102) is right only in itself, not in the form of rightfulness — that is, not just in its existence. In place of the violated party there steps forward the violated universal, which has its own peculiar actuality in the court, and takes over the prosecution and punishment of the crime, which thereby ceases to be a merely subjective and contingent retaliation through revenge, and is transformed into the true reconciliation of right with itself, into punishment — in objective respect, as the reconciliation of the law, which restores itself by superseding the crime, and thereby actualizes itself as valid; and in subjective respect, of the criminal, as the reconciliation with his own law — a law known by him, and valid for him and for his own protection — in the execution of which upon him he thus himself finds the satisfaction of justice, [as] merely the deed of what is his own.