Overview

Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life--including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing.

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9780674015623

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Lawrence Friedman never forgets that the formal law is always subject to the living law. Private Lives tells a story of formal law declaring one thing, people coping with its demands, the law becoming more and more out of phase with practice, and then law makers patching it up more or less successfully, while the courts, for lack of any alternative, are asked to decide the undecidable. As always, Friedman gives a good story, told with insight, irony, and humor.--Stewart Macaulay, University of Wisconsin Law School Lawrence Friedman is the premier historian of American law, and particularly of family law. Here he distills the results of his immense learning into a fascinating brief narrative of clear, broad themes and illuminating details. Private Lives is written with dash and charm, and the shrewd awareness that, although law ultimately changes in response to social pressures, the rules prescribed by the family law on the books are often very different from the actual behavior of people making choices about marriages, divorces, sex lives, and children.--Robert W. Gordon, Yale University Private Lives is a delightful and invaluable short work. In five solid, well-written, and fully documented chapters, Friedman highlights the main changes in American family law since the nineteenth century...This work is so readable it could be used as an undergraduate text and so solid it can serve as a desk reference for professionals.--Joseph M. Hawes American Journal of Legal History

Lawrence Friedman never forgets that the formal law is always subject to the living law. Private Lives tells a story of formal law declaring one thing, people coping with its demands, the law becoming more and more out of phase with practice, and then law makers patching it up more or less successfully, while the courts, for lack of any alternative, are asked to decide the undecidable. As always, Friedman gives a good story, told with insight, irony, and humor.--Stewart Macaulay, University Of Wisconsin Law School

Private Lives is a delightful and invaluable short work. In five solid, well-written, and fully documented chapters, Friedman highlights the main changes in American family law since the nineteenth century...This work is so readable it could be used as an undergraduate text and so solid it can serve as a desk reference for professionals. -- Joseph M. Hawes American Journal of Legal History

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