Every day, practitioners enter courthouses built for a bygone society, facing disputes once legally invisible, raising the question of whether law shapes society or society shapes law.   

The courthouse and a changing society

For generations, courthouses in buildings that predate the 1960s have served as forums for resolving disputes in an ever-changing society. Legal scholars have long recognized that this evolution is not driven by statutes alone. Whether one credits Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound’s theory of sociological jurisprudence or Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s observation in “The Common Law,” (1881), the premise is the same: The law follows society, not the other way around.

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