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law and community in three american towns
Carol J. Greenhouse
(Author)
·
Barbara Yngvesson
(Author)
·
David M. Engel
(Author)
·
Cornell University Press
· Paperback
law and community in three american towns - Greenhouse, Carol J. ; Yngvesson, Barbara ; Engel, David M.
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Origin: U.S.A.
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Synopsis "law and community in three american towns"
Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns--located in New England, the Midwest, and the South--view the law, courts, litigants, and social order.Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," "Sander County," and "Hopewell" interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between "community" and "rights" as rival bases of society.The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change.