Law and Values. Values are a culture's standard for qualitative assessment and its guide for conduct. A society's formal and informal customs and institutions influence and are shaped by its values, which are not only embedded in its laws but are also influenced by them. Conditions of barter or market economies; rural or urban densities; patterns of cohabitation; clan, nuclear family, or kinship groups; political or hereditary military groups; polis or autocracy all define—through permission and prohibition—acceptable and unacceptable conduct. Values also arise historically through resolutions of conflict, and they are stratified and justified in the narrative myths that ground the culture. Religious, moral, instrumental, political, or economic values are all embedded in a society's institutions and customs. As one of those institutions, the law defines and stabilizes those values, which are resident not only in...