ALBERY JAY NOCK & ME

Nock is considered to be an early libertarian by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and he can also be thought of as an anarchist, but not like Kropotkin.  I'm reading a collection of essays, etc. written by conservatives from 1900 to 1945 and includes Nock's Anarchist Progress (1928) in which I pretty much agree with this observation by Nock:

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a
boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor,
scared little brat, who had intended something
no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be
a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence
the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but
the law left him no option. I was struck by
this. The judge, then, was doing something
as an official that he would not dream of doing
as a man; and he could do it without any sense
of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because
he was acting as an official and not as a man.
On this principle of action, it seemed to me
that one could commit almost any kind of crime
without getting into trouble with one's conscience.
Clearly, a great crime had been committed against
this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it—the judge,
the jury, the prosecutor,the complaining witness,
the policemenand jailers—felt any responsibility about
it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials.