This book analyzes legal procedure as part of a complicated interaction between private ordering and public intervention. Modern society brings people together in a variety of settings and injects an active state presence into everyday activities. Inevitably there are disputes and they are settled based on social norms or on an understanding of what is right and what is wrong; what is contestable and what is not. This private ordering of responsibility occurs against a backdrop of what might occur were the matter to be taken to the more costly system of public dispute resolution. In this sense, disputants outside the legal system are said to be bargaining in the shadow of the law.