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Inside The Castle: Law And Family In 20th Century America, By Joanna L. Grossman And Lawrence M. Friedman (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Inside the Castle: Law and Family in 20th Century America, by Joanna L. Grossman and Lawrence M. Friedman, is an entertaining and occasionally frustrating history. In the book’s introduction, the authors offer two big ideas. Their first idea promotes the instrumental explanation of law, and the second idea is the rise in the last part of the twentieth century of what the authors call “individualized marriage.”

Both these ideas have been long promoted by Lawrence M. Friedman, one of the nation’s foremost legal historians, and in many respects, the evidence adduced by the authors confirms both big ideas. Grossman and …