Latent or hidden effects of laws have received little attention from social scientists and (outside the oral tradition of practicing lawyers) almost none from the legal profession. Such effects, and often latent functions too, may differ sharply from the particular laws' ostensible purposes. Taking, as this writer does, defamation as an illustration, the law's ostensible manifest purposes ( (i) to restore, so far as possible - by monetary compensation or other means - the unlawfully injured person's reputation to its pre-defamed state, and (ii) to punish contumacious action by award of exemplary damages ) is shown to be subordinated, perhaps even supplanted, in several quite common situations where the rules and procedures bend to achieve outcomes different from those advertised by the law. Some such effects are unplanned; some plainly are engineered. A few may be viewed by one or both parties as beneficial; others as destructive. Those issues aside, judges, lawyers, litigants and the public might agree that things ought to be called, and be seen to operate, by their proper names and by undisguised procedures. The example of the late Robert Maxwell is used to show how a person of wealth and power could long exploit defamation laws to shield a questionable business reputation from legitimate questioning. That saga serves mainly as a springboard to examination of half-a-dozen other critical issues. Each involves the masking or manipulation of defamation rules and latches attention onto their moral, cultural or economic ramifications. Latency is demonstrably present in law. To ignore it, or to regard it as excrescence or contradiction, is to short-change all parties to the business of social and legal reform.