part ii • legal cultures • kjell å modéer the money. Life is full of calamities. And there is no expectation that you will get any compensation. Life is unfair; that’s the way it is. If your house burns down, you lose your house. If locusts eat your crop, you lose your crop. That’s quite different from what it is today. The book is about the transition to what I call total justice, where there is a general expectation of some sort of recompense. Well, in away yes. But, frankly, I have written a lot of books and I can’t say why I came to write this or that book. I get an idea and I pursue it. I still like that book. I think it explains something – and it came up in the discussion today [at the International Junior Faculty Forum]. Again, often they started with an observation, and that started me thinking. TakeThe Horizontal Society. In traditional societies relationships are vertical: parent and child, lord and commoner, king and subject. When you come to modern societies, relationships become more horizontal. In other words, for a kid of course parents are still important, but the peer group has become very important too. Society has become more horizontal. I began to explore this idea, where it comes from and what it means; that’s how I came to write that book. I liked it. I don’t know if anybody else did. AndThe Republic of Choice is about my perception that in modern legal culture choice, to be able to choose, is a key concept in the way we organize our lives. Some of the reviewers totally misunderstood that book. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough. One of the reviewers was very 16 Lawrence M. Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1990); id., Horizontal Society (Newhaven: YUP, 1999). 116 When I asked you why you wrote this book, I thought it was perhaps because of your concept of legal culture. In the 1990s you wrote a couple of books which were your contribution to the analysis of cultural changes in America and the global legal culture and identity problems, The Republic of Choice and Horizontal Society.16
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