ict developed, and talks to the officials involved in the court case and the mediation, meaning the prosecutor, mediation staff, mediators, clerk, police officer on the scene, and police liaison officer. She gathers information from people in the courthouse and from the parties themselves; she consults case records in the courthouse and the mediation program. In her presentation, she has changed the names of the people to protect their privacy. She did not tape-record mediation sessions, interviews, or court sessions, so the dialogue she presents is recreated from her detailed notes.
The rationale for this investigation is to answer certain questions about the legal system, questions that have bene raised and debated in recent years concerning the supposed explosion in litigation in the American courts. Merry sets up a dichotomy between the views and attitudes of what she calls the legal elite and the views and attitudes of the common people who have to avail themselves of legal assistance or legal processes in order to solve real problems, problems which are often treated abstractly by the legal system but which are real and painful to the people involved. Her decision to concentrate primarily on white working-class Americans seems to be related to this view--she wants to understand the rationale of the common American who has not been especially educated
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