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Lawyers As Assimilators And Preservers, Thomas L. Shaffer, Mary M. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The United States, more than most nation-states, has a history of confrontations between one culture and another, and of law as a means of ending cultural confrontations. Again and again in America, our dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture has dealt with an alien culture and, as the story is usually told, overcome it. The dominant culture has used the law to bring the vulnerable culture into conformity to what we have referred to as "the American way."

We want to suggest that such a legal figure has two ways of using his legal power to deal between cultures—ways that are different …