| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lawrence M. Friedman. Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 230. $27.95.

Lawrence M. Friedman never writes with limited ambitions or small palettes. Although this book is not a massive tome like his well-known History of American Law (1973) and American Law in the Twentieth Century (2002), it is a sprawling look at the intersection of law, history, culture, and human character. His declared goal is to explain how a notion he calls "plural equality"—"the collapse of the notion of a single dominant ethos" (p. 3) and its replacement with an array of norms of legitimacy—relates to family law and personal privacy. Along the way, he writes about the history and contemporary structure of marriage, divorce, child custody, adoption, surrogacy, notions of parenthood, birth control, abortion, the right of privacy, and the impact of the media on legal developments. While much of this writing is extraordinarily good synthetic analysis of broad bodies of legal history literature, Friedman also poses a series of important questions that establish a large agenda for future research by both legal historians and law school scholars.

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