The observation that Great Britain and the United States are two countries separated by a common language has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas, and Winston Churchill. The Law and Society Association's (LSA) Presidential Addresses tend to be one of the occasions when this overworked observation clearly rings most true. More precisely, since language is but one dimension of culture, an equally widely credited truism, it is always the point in the Annual Meetings at which an alien tends to feel most alien. For me, the achievement of Kitty Calavita's Address lies in the way that it helps me to define that feeling of strangeness.