Whether it constitutes the specific ethics of a legal phenomenon or the mere dependent variable of a system of regulation, the certainty of law underwent some quite contradictory fortunes during the twentieth century, experiencing powerful material adversity and abrupt declassifications in the table of values. This essay ventures a critical reappraisal of the figures and motives behind what has become a structurally problematic mindset in pluralist societies. For this troubled concept, beset both by metaphysically flavoured expectations and by dimensional downscalings of an historicist inspiration, this essay attempts to imagine a destiny that is neither heroic nor decadent, in which the suspect legend of objective, scientific certainty is replaced by the democratic value of an intersubjective, dialectic certainty, entrusted to a local consensus and always discursively reversible.