Formal mediation efforts are necessarily intertwined with perspectives about law and justice. These efforts emanate from everyday life experiences, including language, culture, and politics. Experience contexts are mediated by contexts of meaning, which are embodied in actual disputes. Variations occur in cultural meanings of law when legal and other agents of social control are used by people with problems and when people use alternative forms of dispute resolution. People in different social positions, defined by class, race, gender, and experience in court, seem to have different perspectives on the legitimacy of the law. Architects of legal order regard it with more enthusiasm and are more likely to see it as fair and just than those at the bottom who are the objects of its control. Underlying these variations, however, is a common understanding of the law as help. For all social and ethnic groups, the law represents a resource, a service to which they are entitled when rights and interests are threatened. The pronounced element of strategy and pragmatism in the criminal underclass and the white working class is, in some ways, similar to the way elite lawyers and their clients look at the law as a tool to be shaped for particular purposes, although less powerful groups do not generally believe that the legal system has produced a fair and just society. 27 references, 1 table.