"We are presently experiencing what may well be a major transformation of our legal system. Recent years have witnessed repeated attacks on formal legality, complaints about excessive litigiousness, and insistence that the state is being asked to do too much. The Politics of Informal Justice is concerned with a important expression of this general tendency -- informal justice -- the process by which norms are declared, modified, and applied to behaviour in ways that are relatively non-bureaucratic, undifferentiated, non-professional, and independent of official law. Volume 1 examines a broad range of American perspectives on informal justice by lawyers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Volume 2 offers a comparative perspective on the phenomenon of informal justice"--Jacket.