ABSTRACT
The idea that law provides categories through which people come to understand day-to-day reality has been emphasized in the works of a number of the so-called Critical Legal Scholars. Professor Lawrence M. Friedman, for example ignores the possibility that law might have a constitutive impact in society and clings to the neo-Durkheimian view that, as Friedman put it, law is “relative and molded by economy and society.” The most obvious case in which law is constitutive involves situations in which Persons find themselves in a relationship they value and then discover there are no shared social norms—that is, no consensus about appropriate behavior. There are two obvious ways in which law can become constitutive of new social expectations rather than simply functioning as a mirror of existing social norms: First, law may be the source of new social expectations for novel situations. Second, law may be the source of new expectations for existing relations.
