ABSTRACT
This chapter employs ten semi-structured interviews with social workers, police officers, a barrister, a solicitor and other professionals familiar with the Tottenham riots, in order to offer an insider's view into what community means in today's London and how it is linked to law, justice, social order and identity. Cotterrell's law-and-community approach cuts across numerous discourses in law and social theory, lending itself to multiple interpretations and applications. Each community has its own form of 'sociability', interpersonal trust, legal consciousness and subsequently its own specific form of social order, which Cotterrell elevates to a source of law par excellence. The common law of the future should be a law which recognizes and acknowledges the plurality of forms of legal consciousness, the diversity of social and moral values and, ultimately, the variety of forms of life, without requiring stable community relations based on mutual interpersonal trust.
