Justice and injustice might make a wonderful topic for this play. Death and the Maiden contrasts ideal and practical concepts of justice. Both Paulina and Gerardo perceive the considerable injustices exerted by the former military regime, but they differ in their ideas of how justice can best be served under present circumstances. Gerardo believes in the efficacy of the commission to which he has been appointed, feeling that justice will be served by faithfully investigating human rights abuses and then turning the findings over to the country's courts. Paulina, however, is suspicious of the loyalties of those "same judges who never intervened to save one life in seventeen years of dictatorship." To her mind, justice cannot possibly be served through the channels which presently exist, so she resolutely takes the law into her own hands. The brutality of her past experience is undoubtedly at the root of her position; when Gerardo pleads with her at one point to be "reasonable," she bitterly responds: "You be reasonable. They never did anything to you."