Abstract
This article suggests how law and the arts can shape a community’s identity over time, by exploring the unique parallels between the common law and the folk music of the Appalachian region of the United States — two cultural transplants from the British Isles to the early American frontier. Both preserve a backward-looking, cultural memory at the same time as they accommodate gradual changes in social conditions. Thus, this comparison argues that these essentially unwritten legal and musical traditions similarly transcend geographical and temporal distances, reflect and influence normative attitudes, and rely upon relatively open communicative processes in transmitting their core information. As living traditions, then, the common law and Appalachian folk music open small but important spaces for pluralistic discourse, where social conflicts can be reconciled over time and new identities forged from old ones.
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