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Law, Time, And Community, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Research concerning law and social change has almost always treated time as a universal constant and a baseline against which variations in behavior can be measured. Yet a significant literature exists demonstrating that researchers can also regard time as a socially constructed phenomenon requiring analytic interpretation in its own right. This article explores two aspects of the human experience of time that were especially important for the residents of a rural American community: the sense of time's iterative character and its linear or irreversible quality. These two ways of experiencing and conceptualizing time played a significant part in efforts by …