In A Pictorial History of the Western Film, William K. Everson contributes this appreciation of Law and Order, “one of the sound era's most overlooked Westerns (and one of its finest)... Although based on a novel by W. R. Burnett, using fictional names, it was clearly built around the lives of Wyatt Earp (played by Walter Huston) and Doc Holiday (Harry Carey).... Law and Order, partially scripted by John Huston, was a slow-paced, gritty Western that matched Billy the Kid in recapturing the old Ince-Hart flavor. There was a great deal of tension, but little traditional physical action throughout the bulk of this film, which literally exploded in its last reel into the finest reconstruction yet of the famous gun duel at the O.K. Corral.... (Director Edward) Cahn made his camera a participant in the short, sharp, tightly edited battle.... Perhaps the real beauty of Law and Order lay in its formal yet unforced style.... (It) achieved a sense of Greek tragedy without consciously striving for it (as High Noon was to do). Law and Order was remade twice, once as a formula Johnny Mack Brown ‘B' in the forties and again as a Technicolor, action-filled and somewhat brutal Ronald Reagan ‘A' in the fifties....”