It has often been observed that the United States is a country built on law. Justice Anthony Kennedy has noted that Americans were given ‘a self image, a self identification, a self understanding about who they are’ from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Rivkin and Casey referred to the United States as ‘a nation bound together not by ties of blood or religion, but by paper and ink’. Paul Kahn has described the importance of law to the national sense of identity; according to Kahn it is participation in the legal system that unites the United States into a single community. ‘The rule of law, for us, is not simply a matter of getting the content of rights correct. It is first of all an expression of our sense of ourselves as a single, historical community engaging in self-government through law.’ According to Allott, ‘American law is not merely one social system among many. It is the central instrument of the self-constituting of American society.’

Some observers of the predominant place of law in US culture believe that law provides a kind of ‘cultural glue’, binding together a diverse nation and ‘serving as a focus of values and aspirations that define the American people’.