SOURCE: "'A Parental Affection': Law and Identity in Cooper's America," in "The Guardian of the Law": Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, pp. 1-24.
In the following essay, Adams contends that Cooper was ambivalent toward the law in America because he "was impelled to believe—emotionally and intellectually—in the law's ability to achieve both social and individual integrity by the same set of historical and psychological conditions that encouraged him to reject the law as divisive. "
