Shared experience, not formal machinery, kept state laws from diverging into separate languages

Evidence

In a federal system, each state was sovereign—​up to a point. Diversity was deep-​seated, and impossible to eradicate, despite a common economy, a common legal tradition, and despite the tools (railroad, telephone, telegraph) that bridged the distances, despite the West system of reporters and digests. … There were regional groupings, to be sure. “Legislative precedents” traveled across the country. California acted as a focal point for western legislation and case law; Nevada, its desert satellite, drew on it heavily. The southern states looked to each other for ways of getting rid of black voters; the smaller New England states modeled their railroad commissions on the statute in Massachusetts; states of the great plains had common problems of agriculture, freight rates, grain storage, railroad regulation; they all borrowed solutions from each other. In general, what kept the dialects of law from becoming separate languages was their community of experience. The states were moving in similar social and economic directions, and the law went along. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2373

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State-language absorption of competing vernaculars was largely unplanned initially — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 308; Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572; Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 197 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• State-language absorption of competing vernaculars was largely unplanned initially #corroborates (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 308
• Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies #corroborates (0.85) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 197
• Culture need not align with language and state boundaries #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1089
• Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 487
• Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation. #corroborates (0.85)
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572
• Conflicting sister-state precedents paradoxically fuel common-law change rather than stability #corroborates (0.75) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3534