Family And Children In Anglophone Legal Culture: A Way To Understand The Global Age

As Anglophone legal method comes to predominate in a regimen of global law, it is useful to examine its approach to family and children. Such matters as the nature of family and mode of childhood training have been fundamental to its operation for several hundred years. One way to understand its approach today is to examine its development in the past. The paper begins by discussing three levels of English legal culture: hereditary, professed, and individuated. It examines how these legal stratum correlate to the three rankings of nobility, middle class, and laboring multitude. It touches on the different modes of education employed to prepare the children of each group for their self-understanding and for their place in the world. The paper then discusses how these patterns of differentiation are rooted certain medieval traditions that began with the imposition of Norman Kingship in the eleventh century. It explains how the Common law grew out of that tradition, how that law developed, and how its medieval attributes survived into the modern world. It examines how the rise of a merchant class became assimilated to the Common law, and how both strands of development were influenced by two modes of learning: Ciceronian and Calvinist. The paper discusses how, in the nineteenth century, a Formalized English law came to be implanted in the United States. It examines how a unique Anglo-American legality emerged, and how it began to influence the nature of family and raising of children. It explains how the three stratum of English class fit into this legal regime and how it prepared each rising generation to enter a legally administered world. Finally, the paper discusses how twenty-first century technology shapes Anglophone legal culture, as America becomes the harbinger and hegemon of its global project. Laboring families are atomized, adults individuated, and children are socialized by transmitted sound and image. The conclusion asks what effect these changes have on the hereditary, professed, individuated, and children under a global Rule of Law.